


The Hentai World Of Eilverra

by Huitzil



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Aphasia, Bloodplay, Bondage and Discipline, Brain Fucking, Breeding, Bunny Girl, Casual Sex, Consensual Non-Consent, Corruption, Culture, Exhibitionism, F/F, Futanari, Goo Girls, Hentai, Hypnotism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Incest, Latex, Light-Hearted, MILFs, Magical Girls, Mind Break, Other, Rough Sex, Selfcest, Service Kink, Soul Bond, Succubi & Incubi, Transformation, Vampires, Wholesome Kink, Worldbuilding, Writing on the Body, bimbo, mini-giantess, petrification, shortstack, tags for individual chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:15:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 73,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25394464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huitzil/pseuds/Huitzil
Summary: Descriptions of various sexy cultures and traditions in the fantasy world of Eilverra, a place for lewd stories, characters, and roleplay. Offered in the hope that you will find them neat and they give you ideas for your own lewd fantasies, whether on Eilverra or elsewhere.Many different kinks, but they will be signalled at the start of each chapter, so you can skip over the ones you dislike. Expect a lot of futanari and breeding, though.
Comments: 29
Kudos: 104





	1. It's Magic, I Don't Gotta Explain Shit: Eilverra As A World

_(content warning: setup before we get to the sexy interesting stuff)_

Eilverra is an all right world, all told. Nice and spherical, more water on the surface than land. Orbits a sun along with 4 other planets, has 2 moons of respectable size. Atmosphere is the tried-and-true nitrogen and oxygen mix, a solid pick. Recently went through an Industrial Revolution, that’s turning out well, people can travel like never before, prosperity is coming to everyone, and there’s new Art Deco styles and vacuum tube machines that can compute numbers for you. So that’s neat for them. A gender balance that is mostly female, some “futanari” (female-presenting hermaphrodites), and as few men as you think a setting can have and still be believable. Five continents, populated with all sorts of different races, peoples, and cultures, with their own stories and art and interactions with each other. It’s, uh… got a pretty stable magnetic field going… good ol’ reliable gravity keeping it together...

Okay, there’s no avoiding it. The thing is that all of these cultures and peoples are horny as fuck. An observer from another world would find it completely preposterous. Every culture is overtly sexual down to its fundamentals, every people has their twist or their kink and then some more individual quirks on top of it. There’s a race in there who engage in violent (but consensual) “surprise sex” who can go out into the rest of the world and offer up a brutal sex-fight to other species and there’s a good chance they’ll find someone down for it. There’s no hard line between “porn” and “cinema” because damn near everything has sex in it, and you can’t even fade to black because it’s usually crucial to character arcs. 

Which is weird, but good for you, gentle reader! Eilverra is a world that’s made specifically to be a fun setting to make sexy stories and erotic roleplay in, with lots of options to explore, ideas to inspire your own imagination, and the ability to do archetypal fantasy stuff or to go in interesting new directions with it. After this, each chapter will consist of worldbuilding articles that describe cultures within it and their kinks, their history and development, how those things made their kinks, etc.

**Theory Of Lewds**

Before we go into the diegetic details of the world and how you can use it, let’s talk a bit about what we’re doing and why. Eilverra isn’t just a “lewd” world, it’s a kinky world, specifically a hentai world. What’s the difference? Something that is lewd or pornographic is sexual in itself, like a picture of a sexy lady. Hentai is sexy because of the emotional core, the essence of the idea it conveys. If you were to draw out what a sexy anime girl would look like on the inside, her skeleton would be a nightmare, her eyeholes take up too much of her skull, she doesn’t have room for organs, she’s clearly something monstrously inhuman. But we don’t care, because those exaggerated physical traits on an anime girl are the essence of an idea conveyed to us. Her eyes are gigantic, but only because we pay so much more attention to eyes. Her curves are exaggerated to evoke and magnify the essence of sexy, not depict it as a 1:1 representation.

So that’s what we’re gonna do here. Hentai worldbuilding isn’t about wall to wall pornography, and not necessarily about realism, it’s about communicating the essence. The cultures described in each chapter are going to have details and histories that aren't sexually explicit, because the point is not to show an image of people doing sexy things, it’s to evoke in the reader that idea, that essence, of a world that runs by sexy rules and does sexy things. It should spur your imagination, make you want to tell a story or play a role or make a character hailing from there. 

Of course, one part of communicating that essence of an entire world is making it and the people in it feel real. If everyone just does their kinky thing all the time, and there’s never anything else, they feel kind of flat, don’t they? But if you fully detail everything, then that’s boring, and you’re going to find that you can’t make your sexy society work when it gets down to the nitty gritty. I find a scenario is the best when there’s a bit of de-escalation, something that shows “hey these are still people and they still have wants and dreams outside of sex and they still have to put up with nonsense that makes them roll their eyes.” That makes the characters feel like they can have depth, and more importantly, we can trust the narrator saying “all the stuff I am not explaining to you just works well enough offscreen, don’t worry about it too much.” The people obviously have the full range of emotions, there’s joys and sorrows, so we don’t have to go digging too deep and find that this place completely falls the fuck apart when closely examined.

So that’s the goal: present articles about hentai cultures or places that evoke the essence of something sexy in the reader’s mind, make them want to engage with or experience it in some way. Present places that are some combination of sexy, funny, and interesting. Give just enough detail about actual problems that the reader can believe three-dimensional characters occupy the world and trust the implicit assumption that the world works when they aren’t looking at it.

Eilverra is a fun and light-hearted world. There’s sex all over, and everyone’s having fun with it, because everyone is some kind of horny bitch. Sex should be a good time for everyone, and it should be everywhere! Even the “darker” kinks like slavery are interpreted in the most fun and lighthearted way. Taboos only exist in a meaningful sense so that you can feel more naughty fun by violating them. Major bad things happen, like wars and murders, but they are offscreen, not that important, not that often. Aspects of the setting are built to make it fudge-friendly even if you haven’t thought everything through, so you can make up whatever you want. You can even decide the world is much darker than I portray it, if that’s your thing, and declare the light-heartedness is a comforting lie people tell themselves. That’s not my thing at all, but I try to leave some strategic ambiguities for you to interpret how you want.

Got that? Good. Back to our planet. It’ll get hornier in the later chapters after we set up the world, trust me.

**Species**

Species on Eilverra evolve and take on a humanoid (and we’ll use ‘humanoid’ for familiarity even though their actual word is more like “elfanoid”) shape and posture as they develop the ability to use intentional magic. Humans are magic-using primates, but the humanoids of Eilverra descend from many many different types of creatures. Because their evolution is convergent, every humanoid race is sexually compatible. Any two humanoids with the proper equipment can make a baby, even though some couplings take more effort than others. And they do. Often. Vigorously.

This hasn’t resulted in a world of half-breeds, though, you can’t stack templates like that. Children are one of the parent’s races, with only some minor traits from the race of the other parent. Eilverran cross-species genetics is like a ridiculously large Pokemon typing chart -- different pairings have different matchups determining the relative likeliness of the kid being one race or the other. Our first two cultures are notable: “Bunny” beats everything and “Vampire” loses to everything. Fuck as you will.

There are other forms of life, too. You got your regular-ass plants and animals and bugs and hippos and stuff. Some of the big scary ones might be colloquially referred to as “monsters”, but “monster” has a specific biological definition here: a monster is any race that A: cannot use intentional magic (they probably have a whole bunch of natural magic though) and B: cannot reproduce with only members of its own species. Nobody knows why these traits come together so often, but they do. Monsters, whether savage or docile, want to use other races -- most often humanoid ones, of course -- to make babies. This is where you get your tentacle beasts from, or other forms of fantastic breeding. But some monsters are sapient and mostly humanoid-shaped, like your lamias and driders. Known as “monsterpeople” or usually “monstergirls” since almost all of them are female or futa, they can be hostile or friendly -- but they all wanna jump on a humanoid and have/make some babies.

Most monsterpeople are found on the continents of Undzuli and Xal’qubbor, which we’ll get to in a bit. Their existence there makes absolutely no sense and is impossible because they didn’t have humanoids to breed with until recently, and we’ll explain that right now.

**Ancient History**

Eilverrans don’t think their world’s focus on sex is weird. Why would it be? Sex is obviously the most important thing to any organism that reproduces sexually, so of course cultures and physiology would be focused on sex as way to distinguish themselves and reinforce their culture and values. Obviously doesn’t need explaining. The thing that does need explaining is what the fuck happened to their history.

Eilverra’s name is derived from a term meaning “land of the Elves”, except it’s not in a language anyone speaks, and Elves don’t rule this world at all, but they left ruins in places they could not have possibly built them. Historians in individual cultures would lament incongruities in their own records, things that made no sense due to lost records or imperfect understanding by past historians. But then once the telegraph was invented, they all put their heads together from across the world to compare notes, and it was really, really obvious that this shit didn’t add up. 

Countries that were right next to each other had completely different languages but had obvious linguistic influence from countries on the other end of the planet they had never met. Effects sometimes happened before their historical causes, and every time it was in a year that fit the Fibonacci series. There is a period of 17 years at the same time in every people’s history where literally nothing happened. 

The major prevailing theory is known as the “Time Scooch”, which is also the reason you don’t get to name your own theories any more. The theory goes like so: this world was once ruled by an incredibly advanced race of Elves, progenitors to the modern Elf races, conjecturally named the “Grey Elves”. They had magical and scientific power current society can only dream of. And then they did something really, really, really _stupid_ , and retroactively erased themselves from their history almost entirely, leaving only some implausible structures and lost artifacts that were created by nobody. Time and space had to “scooch” events and places together to keep the world’s timeline mostly intact while retroactively removing the Grey Elves, and sometimes it was a messy paste job. Countries maybe had to move around so that they could interact with each other and create events that originally involved both of them interacting with Grey Elves, the progression of history had to be massaged a bit, there’s gaps and sticky bits and parts that don’t work too good if you think about them too much but it worked didn’t it so what are you complaining about. This doesn’t invalidate history, the past that people draw meaning and identity from is real, but maaaaaaaybe it didn’t happen in that order or involve exactly the same people. 

There’s also, like, a really obvious place for a sixth continent to be, where peninsula on the other five are pointing to and would serve as perfect land bridges. Kind of obvious in retrospect. Whether the Grey Elves were omnipresent and all peoples of Eilverra were their engineered servitor races, or they were absentee landlords holed up in ivory towers contemplating mysteries of the universe, or the stupid stupid thing they did was what made everyone so fuckin’ thirsty in the first place, nobody knows. Frankly, most people don’t care.

**Magic**

Of course, just as fundamental to the world as the land itself, is the magic. Magic is everywhere in Eilverra, it is a simple fact of the world. At some level all living things utilize magic, though only sapient beings can do so intentionally. Many beings have forms of natural magic that work much more effectively and efficiently than most forms of intentional magic, but natural magic complicates your personal aura and makes it more difficult, but not impossible, to work intentional magic. Monsters have enough of their own weird magical bullshit going on that intentional magic is impossible, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t intelligent.

Matter is made of the physical, and magic draws from the ephemeral. Significance, potential, and meaning are made of magic; no intentional magic can disassemble this but natural magic can redirect this energy to its own ends. Mana suffused everything in the world, as everything has potential. Mana accumulates and is expended by all living things, and accumulates in quartz crystals. Mana is expended to create magic; most natural magic is efficient enough that it draws from the body’s natural mana reserve without making a noticeable difference, but intentional magic needs external mana reserves. Magic is cast by constructing “sentences” in the language of magic that enact the desired results; they can be inscribed in runes or sigils, or spoken aloud and laboriously envisioned mentally until it becomes familiar enough that it can be invoked by “muscle memory”. Natural magic is probably inscribed on the being’s DNA but nobody has figured out how, or how that would even work with vampires since they were originally other races.

The ultimate expression of Eilverran magic is known as the First And Final Invocation: a spell that does literally anything the caster wishes. It allows the user to become omnipotent, utterly reshape the universe to her whims, become as far above gods as gods are above mortals.

This spell is not an ancient occulted secret. Every student of magic learns this spell on the first day of their studies; it’s incredibly short and simple and takes two seconds to speak. The purpose of learning this is not to know the spell, it’s to know something else about the spell: if every single atom in the observable universe was its own universe, and every one of those universes had every square inch of it filled with raw mana, and you had access to all of that mana flow, you would still not have enough mana to cast the First and Final Invocation. There isn’t enough room in the universe to even write down the mana cost of the First and Final Invocation. They’ve had to invent new forms of denoting large numbers to be able to refer to the Invocation’s cost and modern vacuum-tube computers can’t calculate how many digits it has.

On day 2 of magical studies, you learn how to snap your fingers and create a flame, expending only mana inside your body and not enough of that to notice. That spell takes two hours to invoke the first time. Learning Eilverran magic is not about raw power; learning Eilverran magic is about efficiency. The primal language of magic has 13 verbs and innumerable adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conditionals, each of which reduces the power and scope of the spell and thus its cost. Knowing your own magical imprint is very valuable because you can exclude use cases that you won’t interfere with, and beings with natural magic can’t cut as much cost this way. Osmium is known as the magic-proof material, because one of the fastest and easiest conditionals to learn is “this spell can’t work on osmium” and leaving that out will massively magnify the mana cost. Different magicians specialize in different conditionals to make their spells castable. Maybe you can use your magic against certain types of people, maybe you need certain weather conditions, maybe you specialize in physics you know well, maybe you’ve figured out resonant material components that work well with your specialty. Because of the Magical Market Hypothesis, magicians will often keep some of the modifiers they know secret, so they can get more of a benefit from them over a greater time before the cost corrects.

The “Magical Market Hypothesis” described by Orcish wizard Graelvur is not technically accurate but close enough for any real use: magic spells can be modeled as trading mana to invisible agents, and the costs and values of spells and their components fluctuate with the volume of trades. This means that mana costs can go up and down over time, and while you may theoretically find a way to “beat the market”, costs will correct themselves and fix any hole you find. What is plausible today, may not be plausible tomorrow. You may have a really, really good spell that you need to wait for just the right opportunity for.

Consent is an important part of most magic that doesn’t just sling energy around. Knowing your own magical profile as precisely as possible is crucial to efficient spellcasting, and knowing your target’s magical profile can give just as much of a bonus, allowing lots of effects that simply aren’t efficient enough to ever use in other situations. Spells of protection, enhancement, transformation, charming, scrying, sensory exchange, all of that stuff generally needs the consent of the target and enough time for them to relay their magical profile. Of course, that’s not to say these things can never be done without the target’s consent; they’re just much harder, cost much more, and can only work on specific types of targets. Two forms of magic that would completely break any setting are mind control and resurrection, so resurrection is functionally impossible and bad things always happen when you try it, while mind control is in theory possible but it’s very difficult, often limited, and requires the caster to constantly adjust the spell on the fly.

A good Eilverran spell doesn’t just do what you want, it is crafted that it can’t do anything you don’t want. Just like how you use it in a story or ERP! Magic is versatile enough that it does what you want it to do as an author, but it won’t break the world or your scene because it can’t do anything you don’t want it to. It’s just too inefficient to break the story! And you can change your mind, too! Want something to be impossible that you did before? Maybe something about the target is incompatible with the previous spell, or maybe the market just corrected itself. It’s magic. You ain’t gotta explain shit.

**Technology**

So, as you might expect, a world with magic and wizards was in Medieval Stasis for a long time. Wizards can do lots of useful things, things us normies can only dream of, but it takes a LOT of study and a LOT of practice and there simply weren’t that many wizards.

Over time, people would slowly mechanize their tasks just to get them done quicker without having to schlep all the way over to a wizard. Several peoples invented the steam engine independently, and that was a great leap in technological progress. But the discovery that really kicked off the Industrial Revolution was the harnessing of electricity: Electricity in this world operates on principles of magic instead of physics, meaning that it serves as a form of mana. Someone discovered that electricity can be sent through a closed circuit containing a magical sigil and activate the spell. Spells involving any discretion on the part of the caster don’t work, and the process is less efficient than direct casting so the effects possible are much more minor, but thanks to electro-magic _now everyone has access to spellcasting_. Technology and commerce exploded. The world was linked by telegraph, then telephone, wirelessly mirroring motions and sounds from one magical node to another. Rather than costly teleportation to limited locations, vessels could be fitted with electrified lightness sigils and create commercial air travel. New methods, new techniques, new _styles_ were developed by a world that suddenly found itself able to just do way more stuff. Travel went from arduous to commonplace, peoples were able to create goods like never before and then trade them for exotics they scarcely could dream of. And of course, go abroad to fuck exciting new people and make all sorts of new forms of porn. It was pretty kick-ass.

(Of course, the arrogant High Elves had this shit the whole time and never told anyone until the non-Elven technology surpassed theirs. Dark Elves actually also discovered this technology, independently, centuries before anyone else; unfortunately it was during their murderous dark days and instead of spreading this knowledge its discoverer kept it secret for decades and then someone had him whacked.)

Unfortunately, Eilverra is in another sort of “medieval stasis” now. The Industrial Revolution happened like one or two generations ago -- short enough to be conceptually “new” but long enough people are starting to adapt and younger people grew up in it. Technology, and aesthetics, are mostly at the level of our 1920s to 1960s. But the next step in our technological development, the computer revolution, can’t happen on Eilverra: since electricity works on the principles of magic, fluctuating values for power and resistance mean sensitive transistors are impossible to create. The best form of computers they got use vacuum tubes and there’s been little development there. So you can have modern-ish technology, but don’t have to worry about computers and the Internet ruining everything.

One other effect of electricity being magical: while the nervous systems of all living beings are fault-tolerant enough to still work when the voltage on their nerves goes up or down, there are areas where this isn’t enough. The rich, unexplored continents of Undzuli and Xal’qubbor had no humanoid civilization because their mana fluctuations are much more severe and humanoids would experience severe seizures as long as they were there, until it killed them. Only animals and monsters lived there. Now, though, there is a cheap and easy electro-magical treatment to prevent this, and humanoids can now seek their riches and adventures.

**Bad Guys**

Of course, you can’t have everything be great for everyone, in a fantasy setting you will need some Forces of Evil from time to time. Aside from mortal nations being assholes, this role is served by something called the Foul.

The Foul lies underneath reality, underneath the concept of reality. It is a void. It is wasted potential. It is that which never was, never could be, and looks with hatred and envy upon all existence. It has a mind, it has a will, and it is a _total dick_. All it wants is to unmake everything, by smashing it, usurping it, corrupting it, but if it can’t do that it will settle for ruining people’s days. The Foul can’t create anything itself, as it is a void of creativity. It can offer deals, bargains to living things, aspects of the world: powers that could not be, if used to unmake what is. Nobody knows how it makes coherent bargains with animals and other non-sapient creatures and rocks, but it definitely does, and that’s where Great Beasts and Sea Colossi and forest monsters and all that shit come from, as well as your evil wizards who make dark pacts with dark powers. 

Fortunately, since the Foul can’t be creative, the races of Eilverra can develop reliable ways of dealing with its bullshit. Nowadays, outside of Xal’qubbor, there’s pretty effective measures in places where the Foul is known to get up to its nonsense. They’ve had their whole history to get a handle on this -- they figured it out. You can still do things involving fighting this Evil Force, of course, you can have something new and unexpected, you can simply have whatever you’re doing be the method that the Foul is dealt with, but it’s there for your dark force needs and it isn’t an all-consuming threat that makes everything else irrelevant. It’s also a great excuse to blame your clumsiness on, it’s the Foul messing with you.

Scientists theorize the Foul may be the hole in reality left by erasing the Grey Elves, but that’s not the best explanation because of how thorough records are of dealing with it. It may be an unavoidable side effect of the fact that for things to exist, maybe something has to be defined as not existing, and that thing is an asshole. Maybe it’s the retroactive memory of all the gods everyone stopped believing in. Whatever it is, fuck that guy.

**The Layout**

So Eilverra has five continents now, though only three of them are occupied by civilization to any extent. Funnily enough, they all have different central motifs to them that help an outside observer categorize what their cultures are all about!

Symbi is occupied almost entirely by humans, with smattering of other races that are deeply entwined with humanity. The cultures there are about sexual aspects of purely human organization, or fantasy species defined by a relationship to humanity. You can remember that because its name is the first part of “symbiosis”.

Talai-Gurvik is about 45/55 humans/everything else. These cultures can mix together and affect each other more than the others, and have an emphasis on how they contrast and interact with the other cultures. You can remember that because its name is two obviously different languages mooshed together.

Etrangia has no native humans on it, just non-human species. Most of these peoples are kind of isolationist: they have affected each other, but not as much as on other continents, and they tend to spiral off into some weird directions. This is for two reasons: their wildly varying physiology and organization means they have less in common and less to offer each other, and for much of proto-history the Dark Elves were kind of fucking with everyone. These guys have more of an element of weird sexy physiology, or cultures and histories extremely dissimilar to humanity. You can remember that because “l’étranger” means “the stranger”.

Undzuli is full of Elven ruins and monsters. Monsters are defined as beings that can’t use intentional magic and can’t sexually reproduce with each other. They need to use (which means fuck) other species to make babies. No significant civilization existed on Undzuli because the severe natural mana flows would cause serious illness and death in magic-using visitors, which all sapient non-monster species are. A treatment has only recently been developed for this, opening the resources and ancient impossible treasures of the continent to exploration. Everyone wants the treasures of Undzuli, and its native monsters are interested in the new travelers for legitimate and illegitimate reasons! This is a place for sexy adventures into the unknown! You can remember because “Undzuli” sounds jungle-ey. At least I think it does.

Xal’qubbor is like Undzuli except it’s fucking frozen ice floes, relics and ruins that not only cannot but _should not_ exist and yet do, laws of magic and physics are sometimes more like suggestions, and the creatures within are gibbering and squamous. The Foul is strongest here. “Xal’qubbor”, it should go without saying, is not a word in any language that ever has or ever will exist. This is the place for horror adventures, for those of you into being fucked by Shoggoths. You can tell because anything with an apostrophe, X, Q, and a double B is eldritch as shit.

**Enough Of That Nonsense, Let’s Get To The Sexy Part**

Can do! At the top of each chapter, there’ll be a content warning, with kinks in order of most to least important, so you can tell if it’s something you’re into -- but you may want to check it out anyway, because these guys have some unconventional takes on kink you may find you enjoy! We’ll have the bit about their history and culture, and then a few drabbles to set the mood and provoke ideas, and then a section about creating characters from the people who were just described. With a special emphasis on “why they might go out in a group of 4 to 6 people of diverse backgrounds and skillsets, and have sexy adventures in the civilized or uncivilized world.” Turn to the next chapter and let’s get started with the Bunnies! 


	2. You’re Nobunny Until Somebunny Loves You: Carrot Valley Bunny Girls

_(content warning: busty blonde bimbo breeding birthing Bunnies with Babbage engines)_

The “magical market hypothesis” is the pithy explanation of why your clever scheme to exploit a gap in mana costs and produce infinite free energy won’t work: the ‘market’ will correct until you no longer profit mana out of the process. Some people phrase this as “you can’t beat the market”, but they are wrong. Because that’s what the Bunnies do. Their entire physiology is one gigantic arcane salami-slicing scam.

The symbolic and magical energy involved in the process of creating life and imbuing it with a soul and placing it out into the world is enormous, far greater than the chemical and energy input. Bunnies, originating in what is now Carrot Valley in Talai-Gurvik, evolved into a humanoid magical form that exploits this: by stealing away some of the mana required to make a new being and make it permanent, they obtain a surplus of mana. Each Bunny will be born many times during their lifespan, retaining the same soul, memories, and identity, but taking on some attributes of each new mother or father they are born from. A while after each birth, they will ‘fade’, disappearing, their souls and minds going back into the queue for rebirth. All the mana that would have gone to the symbolically-expensive attribute of permanence and the creation of an entirely new soul is siphoned off into the communal energy store, known as the Eggregore. Once she hits the front of the line, reborn somewhere close to where she last faded, the “new” Bunny gets her bearings and goes back to whatever she was doing before she vanished.

Bunny culture places no value at all on general intelligence, which leads others to write them off as “idiots”, or, charitably, “ditzes”. They may be ditzy and bubbleheaded, they may be obliviously sexual and have no aversion to being fucked or impregnated by anyone, and they may not remember useful facts like “how to do math”. They don’t value general intelligence, but they DO value social intelligence, managing large networks of connected people and knowing who to go to for what skill. Write off the Bunny bimbos at your own peril: in those teeming Bunny burrows, that Bunny you laughed at is bound to know _somebun_ who’s an expert at whatever thing is going to ruin your day.

**Bunny Physiology**

Like all races who can use magic, Bunnies have the general quote-unquote humanoid shape of Elves, with a few leftover accoutrements of their evolutionary forebears: two long ears coming from the top of the head, a poofy cottonball tail at the base of the spine, and legs that just don’t quit. In that they can kick your head off your shoulders. They have skin tones varying between “milk chocolate” and “peachy keen”, and blonde to silver hair. And, of course, a propensity for breeding.

Bunnies breed constantly, with everyone; there’s a good chance of any given Bunny you meet being pregnant at any given time. Their primary sexual interest is to experience pregnancy and birth as sexually pleasurable, but they still think “normal” sex to get pregnant is a really fun activity to do with pals or a good way to meet people. With pregnancy pleasurable and desirable as an end unto itself, and no long-term risk from STDs, Bunnies almost never turn down sex, even when it comes as a complete surprise. You might think that, since they enjoy pregnancy so much, they would fastidiously maintain 100% pregnancy uptime, but you know, that’s a lot of work, and it’s a lot to keep track of, and really it’s just better to let it happen than to stress out about it.

Though Bunnies age – most of them live to 50 objective years old but more on that later – they do so in discrete chunks when rebirthed, not continuously over time. Early in a Bunny's life, these segments of life between births are shorter, and they grow longer as their lifespan goes on. There is no hard and fast rule for when they occur: it seems to be based not just on time elapsed, but things experienced, and a Bunny who learns or sees a lot of new things is likely to have a shorter time before her next fade and rebirth “locks it in”. A Bunny who dies of unnatural causes is sent back into the rebirth queue just as if she had faded; however, she forgets anything she learned or experienced since her last rebirth. Something to be avoided, to be sure, but not as bad as what happens to everyone else. 

The first few times a Bunny is born, it’s in the form of a colorful, brightly-patterned egg from which nothing hatches. Bunnies guess this is the Bunny-to-be “learning” the basics like object permanence and language and that kinda stuff – the first time a Bunny comes out in recognizable humanoid form, it’s the equivalent of another species’s child being eight to ten years old. Which is probably a good thing, given that Bunnies would not be good mothers to helpless infants. Space inside a Bunny is compressed when gestating another Bunny, so she doesn’t know if her baby-belly will put out a little painted egg or a full-size adult Bunny her size. Since different ages of Bunny have different gestation periods, the onset of labor is usually a surprise, though a pleasant one.

All Bunnies are born female, but Bunnies with a great many experiences, parents, and partners will develop into futanari. They are very popular and respected back in the warren where there’s fewer outside visitors to breed with, and can go out into the world in places where there aren’t many other Bunnies and keep themselves around by keeping ladies knocked up for when they fade.

**Bunny Magic**

Magic is core to a Bunny's being. Most obviously, their physiology and reproduction exist to scam magic energy out of the universe and siphon it to the Eggregore. Even though they aren’t skilled at deliberate magic (their innate magic messes with it but also it’s really hard!) they have innate magic that makes them “lucky”, consisting of many really specific spells to influence outcomes in their favor. The wider diversity of people who “father” them and the more different stuff they’ve done, the more different spells they have available and thus the luckier they are. A Bunny's luck is something she takes great pride in! Touching their fluffy tails is said to give a portion of their good luck, and it tickles in a fun way, so go ahead!

Even if breeding didn’t feel so good, they’d want to do it anyway as common courtesy to the other Bunnies who have faded out, sent the symbolic energy of permanence back to the Eggregore, and are waiting in line to be rebirthed. But allowing fellow Bunnies back in the world is just one benefit: though each Bunny maintains the same soul, memories, and identity over each fade and rebirth, they take on minor qualities of their ‘parents’ each time they are reborn, and a Bunny with more parents is healthier, stronger, and smarter… relatively speaking, anyway. Bunnies, without anyone to impregnate them, are capable of inducing parthenogenesis by lesbian sex with each other; lone Bunnies can induce parthenogenesis by masturbation, but anyone birthed as a result of this doesn’t last as long before fading again and doesn’t get the benefits of multiple parentage. Bunnies don’t fault each other for doing this, even if it is a slight disadvantage to the Bunny being born; you gotta do what you gotta do.

**Bunny Society**

People may want to call Bunnies “stupid”, but this is mean, and inaccurate. The preferred term is “ditzy”, or “spacey”, or “bubbleheaded”. A Bunny is not necessarily an idiot, but she is a bimbo. She’s not really paying attention to most things, and takes some prompting to remember that she might have some useful or relevant information. Bunnies, as a culture, just don’t place any value on having general intelligence, or being perceptive.

But they have incredible social intelligence, and ability to keep track of and relate to people. Due to the pseudorandom nature of what Bunnies are assigned to what births, they don’t have a traditional familial structure or keep track of lineages; nobody really knows who is descended from whom, there is no formal hierarchy of any kind, but the Bunnies all know each other’s names, personalities, and quirks and don’t understand why everyone else has such a hard time keeping track! Bunnies don’t sweat doing a lot of thinking about numbers or math or stuff they think is “boring” or “lame”, but when there is an intellectual task they enjoy, they throw themselves into it with zeal. Given that warrens have hundreds or thousands of Bunnies, odds are, there’s a Bunny in a given warren who just LOVES doing whatever particular task they need, and spends most of her free time on it. And every other Bunny in the warren knows who to go to for it. 

In this way, Bunny society can be called “specialized”, though that isn’t quite accurate, as not everyone has a specialty. Many Bunnies find something that they think is super cool, but many of them don’t. And some of the ones that do, their interest just isn’t useful in any way. Bunnies don’t really care, and since nearly all of them are feeding the Eggregore with mana anyway, they don’t feel a need to pressure anyone to contribute. There is no provision in their society for “disabled” Bunnies because they simply do not have a concept of disability as being different from the norm. Almost everyone is terrible at almost everything, so why make a special new category for Bunnies who can’t do things? So what if you can’t walk, or see, that just means the list of things you are bad at is very slightly longer than everyone else’s, and keeping track of a percentage difference that small is a lot of work and sounds really boring, so let’s just forget that whole category thing.

Bunnies don’t really have any formal or structured government. When asked to produce a leader, Bunnies will go get whoever from her local burrow is best at dealing with the issue currently at hand. Decisions are made by whoever makes the decision, with shaming and vicious gossip and “Not cool, Debbie. Not cool.” being the threats to keep Bunnies from making decisions that harm the burrow or the warren. Bunny priestesses exist, but don’t exert much power over other Bunnies, because their Goddess (more on her later) isn’t usually bossing them around.

To stave off invasion, Bunnies mostly rely on the fact that their burrows are dense and hard to occupy, and that their militia will all come back even if they are slaughtered to the last bun. Outside of dedicated “gun Bunnies” who like fighting, their military prowess is mostly hoping for their collective luck to stop things from getting too bad. Luckily, they have discovered that lots of Bunny breeding with Dark Elves gives them just the luck they need to ward off outside threats! When it looks like someone is going to be a threat to a warren that’s linked to a Dark Elf city, something _inexplicably terrible_ always seems to happen to them, and the problem is solved. Hooray for Bunny luck!

**The Bunny Journey**

For a subterranean species, Bunnies are often seen out and about in the world. It’s tradition to spend a great portion of one’s life, from the teens out to the thirties or early forties, out abroad on what is known as “vaycay”. Seeing what the world has to offer, increasing the chance you’ll stumble on something you think is neat, collecting interesting stories to tell back in the warren, and getting impregnated by a large and genetically diverse population – such journeys are usually done in groups, so that when one Bunny fades, she has a nearby Bunny to be born from to get back to her business quickly, but even a lone Bunny knows where other unassociated Bunnies can be found and keeps in touch with them. Some Bunnies find something they love that can’t be done in the warren, and stay out in the world (oddly enough, the most common reason for this is discovering a passion for practicing law), but they stay in touch with the warren and with the latest group of Bunnies out on vaycay. While out on vaycay, Bunnies usually need to find some occupation to pay their rent and bills, and while being strippers is an obvious choice, they are actually more popular as secretaries and administrative assistants; their ability to keep track of lots of people is quite valuable in that position. Few people complain about their figure or semi-oblivious sexuality.

Once your vaycay is over and your body has fully developed into a thicc and fertile shape, assuming you want to come back to the warren (and most do), then it’s time to settle back down at home. Warrens are networks of major Bunny settlement, with each individual underground chamber being a burrow; each burrow is populated by mature older Bunnies and young new Bunnies learning the facts of life from them, where they will learn Bunny traditions, luck, makeup tips, good spots for vaycay, and interesting stories. Mature Bunnies pass the time by spending time with the kids, breeding like crazy, chit-chatting about their adventures, watching imported TV shows, playing games, just chilling out, you know?

**The Bunny Warren**

While power siphoned from the Eggregore helps all Bunnies, notably in giving them the energy they would get from a healthy, well-balanced diet (which they don’t have), the Eggregore energy’s effects on the warren itself are most notable. The patterned, pastel, eggy matrix of mana compresses time and space around itself, with effects becoming more pronounced with proximity. As Bunnies get older, they move deeper into the warren, and the Eggregore’s compression makes the burrows larger, fitting more Bunnies, and time flows more slowly, giving Bunnies more time to interact with the larger group. At the core of the warren is the Eggregore’s chamber itself, which usually appears to be a vast sunny meadow or beach or some other area suitable for lazing about and chit-chatting, and it is here where the oldest and ‘wisest’ Bunnies are found, sometimes practicing their art, most of the time not doing much more than hanging out. Though a Bunny usually lives to be around 50 before the final fade, experiencing compressed time doesn’t hasten this process – it’s 50 outside world years, not 50 subjective ones, and by their own reckoning they can live nearly as long as some Elves. Of course, not much happens in those long lifespans, but hey, who said it had to? A denizen of the Eggregore core who needs to go to the surface for a day or so may come back to find many years have passed for her friends, but she still hasn’t missed much – not more than she could be caught up on in a few minutes. Just a lot of hanging out, napping, games, and casual sex. Bunnies aren’t into the drama, you know?

The Eggregore isn’t infinite, and space in the warren can run out. Also sometimes it gathers too much mana and starts making like this weird sputter noise, you know, like a _phht-phht-phht-bwooooooo_. When that starts to happen, it’s time to expand a new warren. A big chunk of the Eggregore is separated off, and an expedition of Bunnies carries the new chunk out into the world to find a new place to dig a new warren. It begins as a weak egg with no patterns on it or anything and just sits in a hole, but it will naturally expand its chambers, compress space and time, and develop neat patterns as it gathers more energy. It grows into another full-fledged Bunny warren as its carriers create descendants to feed it and populate it.

**Bunny Culture**

Bunnies may be bimbos who mostly hang out, play around, and have casual sex, but there are some notable contributions to global culture that they’ve made. As hinted at before, “a carrot” is about the healthiest thing they eat (they love them carrots!), mostly consuming sweets, fruits, ice cream, and chocolate. _Mmmm_ , chocolate. Like almost every culture in the world, one of the first things they did with agriculture was ferment alcohol. Bunnies hate being drunk but _love_ being tipsy, so they’ve developed an entire art of ‘mixology’: lightly-alcoholic sweet drinks mixed in different proportions for interesting mixed-up cocktails that will get you sauced but not hammered. Their popularity has been steadily growing worldwide, cocktails are a lot more varied and fun than slamming down hard liquor. Bunnies are universally accepted to be the best mixologists in the world, leading to their popularity as waitresses and bartenders, and other lands emulating their appearance for their own classy servants.

Bunnies may not have families in the traditional sense, but they do have a nice wholesome family game to get together and play with the little’uns: roulette! The roulette wheel is a Bunny invention and its use is a traditional game for them. This makes more sense than you might think, because for a Bunny, luck is a tangible aspect of her being she can exert and take pride in, so it’s a great way to teach kids how luck works. You can play it while focusing most of your attention on talking to each other, but also if you want to you can think really hard about winning and make a strategy about where to put your bets so that when you get lucky it denies the most value to your opponents. Other races have of course adopted roulette as a gambling game, and croupiers dress as bunnies, but sadly the televised “World Series of Roulette” wasn’t very interesting to other races, not even the Dark Elves who sponsored it, because they couldn’t understand the skills at play. Dice are more easy to travel with and craps is the game for bunnies on the go, but everyone has fond memories of sitting at their burrow’s green fuzzy roulette table with their elders, getting cookie crumbs on the outside bets, hearing stories, learning all sorts of neat stuff, feeling like winners. 

Along with selling excess mana, Bunnies can also lease out space in the Eggregore chamber to outsiders who need extra time for things, Mechanical Turing machines aren’t messed up by the time and space compression the way even hardy vacuum-tube computers are, so nowadays every Eggregore chamber has a few banks of Babbage engines constantly computing figures. Even counting the time it takes to repair them after errant volleyball hits damage them, they still can crunch numbers faster than larger electric computers, meaning their computing time can be sold at a high price. Good for the Bunnies, as all that candy and ice cream isn’t free!

Members of other races, though, weren’t really designed to occupy the Eggregore’s compressed space for too long. It doesn’t really hurt them, but anyone who stays in the warren too long starts to become bunnylike: ditzy, VERY easily distractible, giggly, shameless, horny, and blonde. If you’re going to be in a warren for a long time -- Dark Elf ambassadors most commonly are in that kind of position -- you should be aware of this bimbofication and plan accordingly. It’s a good idea to get in the habit of keeping a daily planner and a journal to remember what’s going on and what you’re doing. Since time is compressed and bimbos feel good about most everything, time in a Bunny warren is becoming a popular choice for very busy people’s vacations, where they can cram weeks worth of not doing anything but giggling and fucking into a single day. Some say that Bunnies can carry this bimbofying effect outside with them, but if they do, they have no idea how.

Bunnies may not be very good at deliberate magic, but perhaps most notably they are one of the few species and/or cultures of the world capable of performing true divine magic, wherein they ask for intercession of a deity to perform a miracle. The Bunnies know their Goddess is real: her name is Cyndi, with the I dotted with a heart. They know that Cyndi created them, needs them to generate energy for the Eggregore so she can use it to do god stuff in her god realm, and that she thinks they are doing a super great job and she loves them lots. They know this because Cyndi communicates with them some times: Bunnies, usually priestesses, sometimes lay eggs that are made of hollow plastic and contain messages from their Goddess, written in glittery purple gel pen, that say things like 

**_Wanted to let u gals know u are doing a super great job with all the mana! Love u lots!!!_ **

**_XOXOXO, Cyndi._ **

**_PS. If there’s any goddess stuff I can do for u, lemme know! :-)_ **

Though adherents of other faiths that don’t get miracles have all sorts of excuses why Cyndi isn’t REALLY divine, she is just some sort of trans-dimensional bimbo being who has limited powers but is not worthy of worship, the fact remains that writing a request for a favor on the back of one of her messages, resealing it in the egg, and placing it back inside a Bunny will usually result in the request being granted by divine, sparkly pastel power. While a few letters and eggs are kept around in case of “like a really super bad emergency”, most of them end up being used to ask for sweets, party supplies, or other luxuries. Cyndi is happy to oblige her gals.

* * *

_“Like, we’re totally sorry,” the Bunny secretary said in between chewing her pen cap. “But like, the doctor had a big emergency and now she’s running SUPER far behind. It’s maybe like an hour?” She pushed aside the insurance paperwork, then sat, spread-legged, on the desk. “While you wait, wanna fuck?”_

_Without undergarments, her blonde-tufted pussy was just barely visible in the shadow of her pencil skirt, and she dragged her pen up her pantyhose-clad thigh. “I haven’t been creampied in, like, FOREVER. I’m totally horny.” She rubbed the pen against her pussy lips and cooed. “You want first dibs?”_

* * *

_“Aww, you guys!” the Bunny said, “you totally shouldn’t have! This is so nice of you!” She looked at the faded roulette table with glee._

_“Well,” they said, “it’s not much, but you deserve it.”_

_“Yaaayy!” the Bunny said with a little clap. “Do you guys play? C’mere, it’s super fun!”_

_The Bunny bent down over the table to pick up the stacks of chips. But her skirt was too short, ass too wide, and her snatch too tempting. Her colleague’s cock was immediately stuffed into her._

_“Oh my!” she said in surprise. “Looks like someone’s a winner already!”_

* * *

_The taut, cocoa-colored flesh of the Bunny's pregnant belly glistened with sweat, heaved with each of her ragged breaths. “OhCyndiOhCyndiOhCyndi,” she moaned as her child’s head crowned, stretched the pussy lips she was so desperately fingering. Every contraction sent a shockwave of pleasure that crashed outwards to the tips of her ears and swept back through her. “OhCyndiOhCyndiOhOhOHHHHHHHHHHH…”_

_With each blissfully wracking PUSH, she brought her child further and further into the world. At last, exhausted, sated, shaking, relishing the afterglow, she looked upon her newborn daughter._

_“Stacy? Hff, nnnggg… Hey, Stacy! What have, hff, have you been up to?_

**Bunny Characters**

Bunny names are stereotypical “Valley girl” or “bimbo” or “stripper” names. They have no surnames because of the silly way their lineage works, and don’t need them either. You can be in a burrow with nine different Crystals, and if you say “Hey, Crystal!” only the one you wanted will respond.

But sometimes they have to write things down, and members of other races might not be able to tell them apart, so they take appellations that describe themselves: “The Strawberry Blonde Crystal,” “The Crystal With The Neat Hat,” “The Floppy-Eared Crystal,” and etc. Yes, they are named like Friends episodes.

Bunnies have the perfect built-in reason to go out on adventures: she’s on vaycay, she wants to see the world and meet new people and do cool stuff! Keeping a bunny around is a good idea for teams that do dangerous exploration: a super lucky girl with you will put a limit on what kind of bad things can happen to the group. But Bunnies are also prized for servant and assistant roles, and they often serve as the grease that keeps a group moving smoothly. They know people’s quirks and needs, and let’s face it, they are fun to be around.

Bunnies often bounce around their lives with no greater plan, just seeing what happens to them, down for whatever. But not always! A Bunny can be as ambitious, or as intelligent, as any member of any other race. They just don’t think those things are required or relevant to your worth as a person. A genius polymath Bunny won’t look down on anyone who is less intelligent than her, because it simply doesn’t make sense to her value system. (But Bunnies who are kind of jerkish may look down on people who are less lucky!) And no matter how smart she is, she’s still kind of ditzy and spacey.

And an important thing to point out is that even for a race that tends to be on the less intelligent side, the thing that unites Bunnies and drives the tradition of vaycay is that Bunnies love to _learn_. They don’t need to be learning anything complicated or particularly important. It can just be meeting new people and seeing new places and having new exciting sex and eating tasty foreign food. But they want to experience neat stuff they can tell others about, and dish about what other Bunnies saw. In the depths of the warren, you might see two Bunnies chatting, and one is talking about court intrigue in the ancient history of Altia, and one is talking about celebrity gossip she heard about Sofia Thucydikos’s awful botched hairstyle, and both those things are just as good.

Be cheerful, be spacey, be outgoing, be shameless, and above all else be and have fun.


	3. The Masquerade: The Vampire Kingdom of Otdikh

_(content warning: vampirism, bloodplay, Gothic atmosphere, hypnotism but not mind control, desperately pretending to be cool, hypnotic service tops, the attempts of motherfuckers to ice-skate uphill)_

The Vampire Kingdom of Otdikh on the heath of northern Symbi is known to foreigners as a cold, barren, windswept place of decrepit castles and palaces, divided up between immortal predators, where all humans are the thralls of a cruel, blood-thirsty master who controls their minds and drinks from their hearts. And indeed, this is partially accurate: it’s cold and windswept as most heaths are, Otdikh architecture actually focuses on looking ancient and worn while maintaining structure and durability, and most importantly it has been dominated by vampires since the first written records were kept.

But you know that thing, right, where the fishermen fish up crabs in the bay, but they throw back any crab who looks like the symbol of their lord? So those crabs are the ones who reproduce and eventually the crabs of that bay all look like the symbol of their lord?

Well, the place with the most vampires is going to generate the best vampire hunters. And since they don’t think of vampirism itself as a perversion of nature, since it was already there, they are going to kill the bloodthirsty tyrannical vampires but leave the ones who are actually reasonable and even-handed. Vampires still develop over the term of their un-life and can pass on traits to their childer.

And, well, it turns out evolution still applies to the living dead.

**Vampires**

Vampires are less than 1% of the population of Otdikh but it’s pointless to pretend you can talk about Otdikh without talking about them.

The vast majority of vampires are in some position of power -- Otdikh operates on a feudal system of duchies overseeing counties overseeing baronies, each of which is almost always run by a vampire, often the childer of the vampire above them, and a chunk of their courtiers, advisors and administrators and such are vampires as well. As modern commerce came to Otdikh, so too did new institutions with new forms of power; it’s not the majority but it isn’t exactly uncommon to find vampires as head managers or school principals or the like. The feudal system operates as if there were princes and princesses above them and a king above them, with each duchy working as if it were a section of a larger unified kingdom, but the last Queen, Nadjtavya, vanished some time in the Bronze Age, before most of the feudal system had even been worked out. Time Scooch. Nobody has ever tried to take her empty throne, but this does not stop vampires from pretending that they are backed by royal authority.

Legends of vampires spread far and wide even before railroads and airplanes connected the world, and they are _mostly_ correct. Vampires are undead; they will not age nor grow sick, their hearts do not beat and their pale skin grows no warmth. The only reliable way to kill them is decapitation, though a wooden stake in the heart paralyzes them and then you can take as long as you want to line up a headshot. The sun is harmful to them. They possess supernatural powers and magicks fueled by blood, which only grow stronger as they grow older. And all of them have blood that serves as an intoxicating aphrodisiac, and a hypnotic, enthralling gaze within their blood-scarlet eyes.

The secret that the vampires don’t want to let out is… yes, they have a hypnotic gaze. What they don’t have are mind control powers of any sort. Locking eyes with them for a few moments will put mortals in a trance, assuming neither are wearing eye protection, where they are more relaxed, comfortable, uninhibited, and suggestible… but they aren’t bound to the vampire’s will. The vampire starts doing something squirrely, the mortal will snap out of it right away to defend themselves. The vampire orders the mortal to turn against their friends, to reveal vital secrets, to betray their ideals, and the mortal will blink a few times and go “What? No, fuck you.” Effective hypnosis to do pretty much anything long-term requires a close positive relationship with the mortal before the hypnosis begins, and anything like conditioning or personality shifts takes a long time and the cooperation of the mortal. Doing anything even worth mentioning requires either a sense of affection or awe, a subconscious acceptance that the vampire fundamentally has the right to exert their will on the mortal. 

The blood harvested from a mortal is more nourishing the more affectionate, happy, relaxed, and blissful the mortal is when it is taken, with the best result being feeding at the moment of the mortal’s orgasm. Pain and fear make the blood mildly poisonous, and if a mortal dies -- for _any_ reason -- while their blood is still in the system of a vampire, that blood becomes caustic and harmful to them. Feeding is an erotic act for both vampire and mortal, but it doesn’t actually replace the sex drive, it enhances it. Close mortal aides and thralls can be conditioned to orgasm, or come to the edge of it, from the act of having their blood sucked (though they still have sex during it, what are they, savages?). To feed from random mortals, they must find someone who is already awestruck and make them feel all chill and happy and loosey-goosey before they fuck them absolutely silly. 

Vampires need the blood of the living to survive. But they really, really need the living to like them and think they are cool -- if they can’t find mortals with that sense of awe and respect and affinity, mortals who think that the vampire should get to entrance them and suck their blood, then the vampires will starve. Even if they have enough confidants to feed on that they don’t need to feed from the populace -- they still absolutely need to feed from the populace and will be consumed with anxiety if they can’t. So aren’t these capes with the red crushed velvet lining totally cool and regal and authoritative? Doesn’t this leather jacket make me look badass and awesome? Does not your liege take care of you and listen to your concerns and keep you happy in exchange for just like the teensiest weensiest little bit of blood every now and again? Isn’t it great to have vampires in charge? 

But don’t tell anyone how nice we are! Don’t let it get out that we’re soft, because we’re still so totally badass and awe-inspiring even though we’re also just and, and not even tender, let’s call it respectful. It can be our little secret that is definitely just between us and not at all something the majority of the population knows but doesn’t talk about because each of them thinks it’s a secret! And besides, doesn’t it make you look cool to be enduring out here in this windswept heath under the enigmatic and totally, completely badass rule of the bloodsucking monsters, all hard-bitten and stuff? Our coolness can rub off on you, and everyone wins! Don’t you like rulers who make sure everyone wins? Don’t you like us? _Please like us!_

**Vampire Hunters**

Otdikh has vampires, so of course it would foster vampire slayers. They’re really, really fucking good at it, perfectly adapting the cutting edge of technology into ancient and proven martial arts. Ever seen gun-kata with two shotguns, one loaded with blessed buckshot and one with sharpened wooden slugs? And they’re lever-actions so they do that badass sideways one-handed flip pump to load in the next shell? It’s pretty awesome. The vampire slayers have mostly coalesced into the Order of Slayers, but there’s a couple of smaller more independent groups running around with their own techniques.

From time to time, other peoples would hear about the rule of vampires and decide that of course that problem couldn’t be solved until THEY came over to be saviors. The vampires don’t even kill these hunters most of the time. The Order of Slayers kick their asses for trying to horn in on their job. “If you aren’t in the Order of Slayers, you’re vampire food!”

Vampire slayers are deeply integrated into Otdikh’s society and specifically its vampiric rule. It LOOKS, to the outside observer, that the vampires have utterly corrupted and subverted the Order of Slayers, and now the Order enforces the vampires’ will (Otdikh’s police are primarily vampire slayers) and the vampires often take slayers as lovers and blood-thralls to show off their dominance. No, actually, the Order recognizes that today’s vampires, being very incentivised to keep their subjects happy and gathering more administrative experience than a human can in their lifetime, are by and large very good rulers, and are happy to partner with them to keep order. But those “subverted” vampire slayers close to every vampire? They are there to keep their vampire honest. Their commitment to defending humanity means that, even deep in enthralling, hypnotic romance to a vampire lover, if their vampire starts to turn into a malevolent monster it’s time for SOMEONE to take a stake to the heart and have a little nappy-nap. The Order of Slayers has its own voice in the national vampiric courts -- it counts as one Grand Duchy, one regular duchy, and two and a half baronies depending on if it’s an odd or even year.

But doesn’t it make the vampires so cool and authoritative to be able to rule over the organization meant to destroy them, doesn’t that require so much subtlety and unflappable composure? And when you learn that this vampire and her slayer are sincerely in love, isn’t that such a heartbreaking and tragic romance that’s so incredibly Gothic it makes you respect them all the more?

**Vampire Blood Magic**

Vampires use “blood magic” primarily; though they can learn the normal kind of intentional magic, the changing nature of their own blood-state makes it harder than even most races with natural magic. Blood magic spells are abilities dependent on what sort of blood is active in the vampire’s system at the time, with certain lineages or bloodlines or even individuals able to unlock different abilities. The traditional suite of vampiric abilities -- turning into mist or bats, controlling the weather, shaping flesh, or popping Celerity and running up a brick wall to kick a guy in the face -- are those that get enabled by the genes commonly found in Otdikh. Over time, as the blood is magically metabolized to maintain the vampire, that blood clears out of their system and they no longer have access to the power. Thus, it is a good idea for a vampire to have a wide variety of subjects who are well-cared-for so you can safely take a nip from a bunch of different lineages to turn on a bunch of different powers. Bloodlines of foreigners and non-humans can unlock strange powers, not all of them useful. (Drink from the largest Orc bloodline, and you can sweat sugar and glaze yourself like a ham. I mean, there’s a chance someone’s into that, but it’s not very useful.)

As a vampire consumes and metabolizes blood, they slowly grow in power. The state of having almost none of this power built up is “hollow”, and “sanguine” is the opposite end of the scale. Regularly take in a certain bloodline, and you can use that power all the time, and having their blood in you makes it better. You become faster, stronger, more perceptive, more elevated above humanity and thus cooler and worthy of more respect and awe. Unfortunately, growing in power by becoming more sanguine is what gives you your vampiric weaknesses. New, hollow vampires can go out in the sun with no problem at all. Pretty soon, direct sunlight turns off your blood magic but you’re fine if you have a parasol or it’s cloudy. Then the sunlight starts to make you itch. You get tired during the daytime. Your reflection is delayed by 3 seconds. The clouds don’t protect you. You feel weaker in the sun. Garlic makes you break out in hives. You get extremely tired during the daytime. Your reflection is delayed so far behind you that you’re catching glimpses of yourself from last week, kissing empty air. Sunlight starts to give you nasty smoldering sunburn very quickly. You feel dizzy when you have to cross a running stream. At around 250 - 500 years, sunlight burns you bad enough to kill you. Stick around after that, and then things start to get weird, like the kind of weird that makes you compelled to count things left on doorsteps.

Stay active for too long, get too sanguine, and all your vampiric curses just become too much of a pain in the ass to deal with. The way around this is to crawl in the ol’ crypt and enter a torpid state, a vampire coma where you flush out the dense, thick blood that makes you so powerful and reset your undead body to a hollow state, with your knowledge intact. (The blood flushed out in this process is like thick, chunky used motor oil and is completely gross. Drainage systems in the crypts are very important.) Vampires can’t awaken themselves from torpor, which is another reason it’s so important to be beloved. Make an organization that will stay close enough to your values to want to keep you around. Sire vampires who look up to you and feel respect and deference and a twinge of romance, and keep your mortals pining for the caress of their wonderful, respected, very very sexy undead ruler. Maybe commission a painter (photography is too much of a hassle), pass out some cheesecake portraits and hang them up in public areas. Get people going “ooh, that is a very sexy, interesting vampire, I want to know more about that vampire, I want that vampire to be around.” Otherwise nobody will come and wake you up and you will look like a jackass, a jackass nobody liked.

Almost all vampires were human, but there are exceptions. The relative speed at which they accumulate and must discharge blood power seems to be tied to their relative lifespan compared to a human. Countess Bunnicula can and will go through an entire cycle, from hollow to so sanguine she is burned by the sun, in a single human lifespan. The vampiric elves will let you know when the sun starts to hurt.

**Humans in Otdikh**

They’re doing fine.

**Vampire Thralls**

A thrall (or familiar) is a mortal, usually human, bound to the hypnotic blood and gaze of a vampire who helps to carry out their will. Thralls gain a portion of their master’s vampiric power and do not age while under the effects of their vampiric blood, taking on echoes of the traits of their masters.

Since this hypnotic power can’t actually turn the mortal against its values or nature, you need to keep that thrall happy and affectionate. Thralls are just as much lovers as they are servants. Be spontaneous! Put them in a hypnotic trance for a while not to do something for you, but just because it’s relaxing and feels good. Remind them how important they are to you. Kiss them out of nowhere. Remember their birthdays. Show you care about their mind-bending orgasm even when you aren’t feeding -- unless you’re edging them until the time of feeding, of course, but only do that to build anticipation and make it fun! And always make sure your thralls are well fed, get iron supplements, and get plenty of rest. A healthy thrall is a healthy vampire!

Thralls can be sculpted to some extent, but only with the thrall’s cooperation, and only over a long period. If you meet the legendary Countess Bunnicula and become interested in your thralls becoming bubbly, ditzy sluts, it takes a while of eroding boundaries and building up thought patterns, each step of which must be agreeable to the thrall. You can, if you work slow and carefully enough, change a thrall so much that their original self would be shocked by what they become, but only if you lead them incrementally on a path of things they accept, a journey which requires an incredible amount of intimacy and trust anyway.

Every relationship with a vampire has to be an open relationship to some extent -- feeding is pretty much inextricable from sex, and even for the newest vampire, one human simply cannot produce blood fast enough to meet their dietary needs. The love-potion effect of vampire blood does lessen feelings of jealousy, but make sure that you and your thralls work out the boundaries of your relationships so nobody feels cheated on or neglected. Maybe there’s a special sex act that only you and this thrall do, and that’s the exclusivity of your relationship. Maybe your thralls get to participate no matter who you feed from, so they aren’t left out. Find a solution that keeps everyone content -- and when taking on a new thrall, make sure all your existing thralls are cool with it. They know you better than anyone, and they can help you pick who to claim next! 

Sometimes thralls are plucked from those mortals the vampire has been observing and taking an interest in (nothing compels them to remain a thrall if they don’t like it, but that’s why you observe beforehand, make sure they’re a good fit) but in contemporary times, there are several under-the-table, informal internship programs to get positions as thralls to the top vampires, emphasizing people skills and sexual prowess. People want so badly to be the servants of vampires, those vampires must be incredible and awe-inspiring, right? Right?

Many thralls are taken with the understanding that they will be turned into vampires after years of long and loyal service, but most aren’t, especially the vampire slayers. A life as a thrall is a romantic life well-lived. Most people are content with that. To turn a mortal into a vampire is a significant undertaking and sign of trust -- if a mortal dies for any reason their blood becomes caustic to vampires, but a mortal must be killed by draining the last drop of their blood to become undead, and that still counts. All of the blood from one dead mortal is enough to kill all but the most ancient vampire. So siring another vampire either requires medically-supervised bloodletting until the amount the mortal has left in them is nonfatal, and then the new vampire must carefully watch and tend to the sire because they still drank half a human’s worth of acid and are grievously wounded. Or, it requires many vampires to all agree the mortal is worthy of vampirism and each of them takes a nip, so the damage done by the caustic blood to any given vampire isn’t that bad. You can also cheat and fly a gorgon in from Algalmathykos, drain enough blood from the thrall that they are certain to die in like two minutes, turn them to stone, wait around long enough to clear the blood out of your system, then depetrify them and finish the job. This isn’t very romantic, though.

Using magic to shape and empower the flesh, vampires can be made to sire and bear children in the regular fashion with a mortal thrall or even with each other. The children will be dhampirs, who have hints of the vampiric power of their parents and are both more resistant to the vampire’s hypnotic gaze and more well-suited to serving it. Many of the Order of Slayers are dhampirs. Having a child this way is an enormous hassle, but vampires still do it anyway. Some motherfucker’s always trying to ice-skate uphill.

**Vampire Organization**

Otdikh operates under a feudal system, where barons report and pay tribute to counts, who report and pay tribute to dukes, who use some of their resources for the common good of all people in place of reporting to a prince or king. Most vampires running their domains do so with an air of absolute, unquestionable, and extremely cool cape-wearing royal authority, subject to no checks or balances save the will of their own liege. In reality, though, they have a bunch of advisors, administrators, emissaries to other domains, emissaries from other domains, and representatives from individual mortal settlements, all of whom the vampire ruler will consult with before enacting their unquestionable autocratic edict. Remember, if people in their domain don’t have enough affection and awe for them, they will literally die of starvation. They are really trying to get it right.

Every member of a vampire’s court is fed on or feeds on others to some degree, even those who aren’t enraptured enough to be full-fledged thralls in a full-fledged relationship. So everyone has some kind of sexual relationship to the vampiric ruler, and thus, with each other. So after a while, they get really, really casual and open about sex. Like, all over the place, out in the castle halls, on the parapet, in the middle of anything. This also helps pick the best and brightest mortals to be the village kmet (mayor), because there’s some really, really nice perks with the position.

Traditionally, newly reclaimed parcels of land, parcels of land that become economically developed enough to require their own administrator, or those whose rulers were lost or slipped away without clear successors, were given out as fiefdoms to newly sired vampires. Now, though, Otdikh has reclaimed pretty much all the land it can from its foreboding monster-infested forests so there’s not many new baronies springing up. This has led some vampires to form alternate organizations: “covens”, courts made entirely or almost entirely of vampires, with a few Slayers watching with a wary eye. The vampires here are all treated as equal, make decisions as a group after hearing petitions from those beneath them, and are seriously fucking each other all the god damn time. Like you will have to report on the state of your local roadways while someone is getting sucked off four feet over. You don’t get to join. The village kmet is a much less competitive position.

When a coven must feed, it’s a group activity. They grab a BUNCH of mortals, enough to throw at least two separate parties, entrance them all until their inhibitions fall away, and have a crazy blood-drizzled orgy over the course of a week or more where the mortals are in a constant blissful daze having all their fantasies and desires catered to, dominated by and being faithfully served by their undead hosts, creating an atmosphere of pure contented bliss and shameless debauchery from which the vampires can eat their fill. They will also sign and stamp a record to give to your employer so you don’t get fired for missing work, and you can show it off to your friends to brag about that magical nearly dreamlike experience.

**No, Seriously, Humans In Otdikh**

Seriously, they are doing fine! Most of their governance is local and thus they have a lot of participation. They have no say in who their liege is, and the vampire’s courts are mostly there to interact with other vampires, but they can’t really complain. Mortal kmet and village chiefs in the court don’t often speak, because they get their business dealt with quickly and without complaint and they don’t often have much to speak of. Speaking out against your liege in public is allowed, they don’t need every single person in their domain to like them, but when a lot of people start listening to you speaking out you get a visit from a couple of thralls and a couple of Slayers -- who ask “Okay, what’s the problem here, and how can we solve it?” People’s needs and concerns tend to get met. Yeah, the vampires have nice artfully-crumbling castles and palaces with fancy debauched sex dens in them, so maybe taxes are a bit higher than they ought to be, but, eh, pobody’s nerfect.

Vampires and their courts are much more hostile to each other than to mortals, jockeying for power, making plays on each other’s territory. The more mortals a vampire has access to, the more magic they can draw from; the greater the territory they control, the more awe and respect mortals will obviously pay them. But not all of them even engage in this kind of power-scheming, and those who do, do so in ways calculated to cause as little disruption and discomfort to mortal subjects as possible. Otdikh military doctrine is all about daytime mortal forces slowly seizing and entrenching strategic positions while highly mobile nighttime vampires strike at high-value targets and then get out before they have to play defense. Because the only time the army gets mobilized it’s to fight off invasion and never against another vampire’s land, and the vampires are right there fighting with them. Once they got hot-air balloons to aerially monitor the monster-infested forests they didn't even need to mobilize the militia very often. 

Otdikh’s culture evolved entangled with vampirism. Vampires would still need their people’s love and awe, but they don’t need that fierce protectiveness and solidarity -- that’s pure Otdikh pride. Otdikh people, living and undead, are known to be a very loyal, hardy people who place strong value in both the family you come from and the family you find. Otdikh liquor doesn’t make use of the most common fermentable plants, but the ones that will also get a vampire drunk if they feed from a drunk mortal. Also, blood is the essence of life, and to mingle blood is to mingle your very being with your lover, so LOTS of Otdikh humans are into bloodplay. Like, go to a drugstore in Otdikh, buy a box of condoms, and it comes with a packet of sterile scalpels and lancets. You don’t have to ask, it’s just taped on. 

Mortals in the know or who have figured out independently that their lords are actually , unironically benevolent consider it an “open secret” and an important fiction to publicly maintain. For the still-frightened, spilling the beans would be like revealing Santa’s not real. More importantly, foreign peoples need to be convinced that vampires are unassailably powerful and can subvert any mortal mind to being their slave. Could you imagine if it got out that the monstrous rulers of Otdikh desperately needed people to love them and think they were cool? They would be invaded without firing a shot, as the borders flooded with people trying to take advantage of them! Worse yet, WE wouldn’t look cool any more! No sir, not going to allow that. Tell everyone how powerful and dangerous and all-encompassing and cool our leaders are. Maybe act brainwashed and blank when you do it if it seems like someone’s not biting. Let’s ask our liege if we can put up border checkpoints to keep out anyone who would take advantage of them, but pretend like we’re doing it to keep people in. And if you move out of the country for whatever reason, you get to act like a super heroic badass who called upon iron will and escaped the terrifying but darkly romantic claws of our overlords, whose siren song will still echo forever in the dark part of your hearts. Check in at the border and we’ll give you a commemorative shovel, you can say you dug a tunnel to get out.

But many, or some would even say most, Otdikh mortals live in “fear” of the vampires. But even then, it’s a fun, thrilling, horror-movie fear, not the kind that leaves you trembling in helpless terror. Oh no, my lantern has gone out in this dark alley! I may be preyed upon by our vampire ruler, who would sweep me up in his power, render me helpless, and have my way with me all night! His way. “Have his way with me” is definitely the phrase a person would say there. Ooh, my spine tingles at the thought! Is the way home left or right? Am I lost in the darkness? Oh, such peril!

Everyone has fun, everyone has their needs met. Until they wander around a dark alley being thrilled by the prospect of their helplessness for too long, and get mugged. Pobody’s nerfect.

* * *

_The baker is closing up shop when an arm crosses her doorway._

_“Hello, my dear,” the Baron says. “A vord?”_

_She knows she shouldn’t look into his eyes, his eyes, his red eyes... They are so deep, so fascinating, there is nowhere else she could look._

_Women’s hands undo her blouse. “We are honored by your craft. Master wishes to reward you,” the thrall whispers into her ear._

_Those eyes feel very comfortable. She would really like to spend more time with them._

_“Yes, come with us,” another thrall moans. “And bring the raspberry tarts. Enough for the whole manor.”_

* * *

_The mask is no longer necessary. Natalia has been driven so far into sexual ecstasy she undoubtedly cannot see; so deep in her trance she can’t even think. She thrashes about in the sheets, screaming the Countess’s name in a deaf tone. All of her senses are devoted to the symphony of ecstasy the Countess plays upon her body._

_The Countess carefully drags a fingertip along her thrall’s throbbing clit, eliciting another soul-deep gasp. The pale, creamy flesh of her bound wrists oozes with dark scarlet. The Countess has fed. But Natalia is a faithful servant. She deserves some more._

* * *

_“My liege, one last thing. I wish to provide an article of tribute, created by my child to honor your rule.”_

_“Vhat is zis? Zis is… Ah, zat is me! Awwww, and zat is you, vith the parasol, and ze sun is scowling and angry! By ze Blood, zis is precious!”_

_…_

_“Yes, my liege, I agree that it is only just that even our children shall bow to your authority and know you rule over their lives, as all mortals should. Which is what you just said. Right now.”_

_“I.. of course! Zat is most definitely vat I said.”_

**Vampire Characters**

Otdikh characters, vampire and human, have Slavic / Eastern European names and surnames. Bulgarian, Serbian, Czech, that kind of thing.

There’s a very obvious reason why a human Slayer might go on adventures: find interesting new beasts of the night, kill them, and write down how you did it. Vampires, though, generally stay home to tend to their fiefdoms and receive the adulation of their people. If a vampire is going out into the world, they probably have a few common attributes: They are probably “hollow” and low-powered, with few vampire weaknesses, so travelling isn’t as much of a hassle. They don’t have title to land of their own or a position within another vampire’s court that keeps them home, whether this is due to politics, having been sired in a crowded fiefdom, or being awoken from torpor with no clear place to go back to. 

But this is not to say there are no reasons for vampires to travel abroad; just that those who do tend to be of a certain type. With Undzuli and Xal’qubbor now available for exploration like never before, Otdikh as much as anyone else wants access to the new lands and resources they offer. And there’s always a pressing reason to gather samples of new blood, to see if it unlocks some cool new power. But most important of all: you need to show the wider world that vampires are majestic and powerful and awe-inspiring and extremely cool! Even if you aren’t the leader of a group, you need a position of respect, like the Problem Solver who takes care of things nobody else can. Your group of friends probably know the “secret” about the whole coolness-masquerade, but you need to keep up an image for everyone else, and you still want them to think that you’re cool and awe-inspiring on your own merit. You probably put your friends into trances recreationally, just to feel nice, and if you don’t have your own dedicated thrall assistant one or two group members may be officially your “thralls”. But it’s more of a part-time thing, they are still clearly very independent and have their own things going on too.

With outsiders you probably don’t want to go with the “fearful in a fun way” atmosphere because you don’t exert enough control over your surroundings. Try to go for “tragic, tortured, extremely Gothic soul nobly caught between personal virtue and the beastly desires of undeath”. People go ga-ga for that shit.

But you know what? Having to hide your weaknesses, maintain this masquerade? Only revealing who you are to those you deeply trust, who can be your lovers? Shouldering the burden of your people’s livelihood? I think that’s pretty tragic. Pretty Gothic. Pretty cool.


	4. My Whole Life Is Art: The Gorgons Of Algamathykos

_(Content warning: non-permanent petrification, exhibitionism, free use, monstroids, patronage, olive oil baths, people talking like Zsa Zsa Gabor despite the fact she never existed)_

It would make sense that a culture like Otdikh would be dominated and shaped by its slim non-human minority -- the vampires are in charge, and don’t you know they can control mortal minds? How, then, to explain the intertwined relationship between the Algalmathykos archipelago, seat of culture and philosophy, and the rare, reclusive, hidden gorgons? I guess this kind of shit is what happens when you get too deep in a lie to admit it and everyone needs to keep up with the Ionses.

**Algalmathykos History I**

Algamathykos is an archipelago that lies between the continents of Symbi and Talai-Gurvik, in the calm waters of the Kathalassa sea. Its many rocky isles are poor in natural resources, but are perfect stops on trade routes, and city-states rose up on these isles to serve the needs (and get the coins) of the traveling traders, soon becoming a federation of sorcerer-kings with a fearsome navy.

Sorcerer-kings need trade routes to come to their islands, but they don’t have much to offer in terms of resources that other nations need (although they do have olives and those are pretty cool). The goods they offered were artistic works: paintings, poems, sculpture. The competition for trade stops took the form of vying for prestige granted by those works of art. Indeed, Algamathykos became famous for its arts and intellectual pursuits, giving rise to aesthetic philosophers whose contemplation of the nature of being came from a desire to understand the Truth of Beauty.

One day, a sorcerer-king named Queen Kalliti wowed the entire Kathalassa by unveiling a work of art of heart-rending beauty and mind-boggling realism. A sculpture, the Aphrodes of Phyra, depicting a woman of stunning grace and eroticism who was so realistically modeled one expected the statue to breathe. Kalliti bragged of her sculptor, Euryale, who would provide her incredible art only to Kalliti’s domain. She originally planned to only show the statue for a limited time, to maintain its mystique, but every trader in the sea was stopping by the state of Phyra to admire the statue. Her coffers were bursting with coin. She commissioned Euryale to craft more statuary to adorn the palace on Phyra, to bless its public spaces with visions of the Truth of Beauty. Yet as her wealth grew, she only grew more paranoid. She tried several times to have the Aphrodes taken down, only to have it replaced after public outcry. Olive oil was forbidden in the gallery, then forbidden within eyesight of the gallery, then forbidden outside of kitchens. Her journeys to see Euryale became more and more secretive, clandestine, circuitous to thwart any observers.

Phyra became famous and wealthy for its art. Then, other sorcerer-kings claimed to have found their own sculptors who knew this secret art, this secret Truth. Some of them were clearly lying, but some were able to produce heart-rendingly beautiful and heart-racingly erotic monuments as well. None of them ever spoke of how they found or contacted their sculptors -- it was some sort of secret order, and they could never breach its confidence. There were tales told, of course, tales of hidden monsters and gardens of imperfect art left in the sea winds, but those tales were told by sailors and everyone knows how drunk they are and nobody else really paid it any mind.

Decades passed, Kalliti grew old, Phyra grew wealthy. The statuary of Algamathykos became legendary.

Then the Aphrodes of Phyra actually did start breathing.

**Gorgons of Algamathykos I**

Okay, let’s go back a few steps. Algamathykos is an archipelago of crummy little rocky islands without much good stuff on them. Some of them are big enough to hold city-states, but some are just like little caves out in the middle of the sea. Even before the Aphrodes of Phyra, sailors told tales about seeing the eerily lifelike statues out in the most remote islands, before the most foreboding caves, of men and women who appeared to be frozen in fear, fighting for their lives, or fleeing the hounds of Hades.

‘Cause it turns out, that’s where Gorgons live.

Gorgons are an ophidian humanoid species, with slitted eyes, skin that reveals glimmering scales when closely examined, and hair like thick scaled snakelike cords. Their slitted eyes have a special power, the innate magic of the Gorgon: their gaze can turn anything to stone. When living creatures are turned to stone, they experience time passing, experience the world around them, but in a hazy, dreamlike state that can flit forward or backward between events and sort of skims over the boring parts.

It takes effort, of course, draining the Gorgon’s natural mana, and it isn’t permanent, and different Gorgons have different strength to their petrifying gaze. The petrification will wear off over time, and slathering the statue in olive oil will return it to flesh immediately. The petrification is used to disable predators for long enough to escape, or disable prey for long enough to secure before they “thaw out”. It’s also handy for remodeling the ol’ cave: build whatever furnishing you like, then turn it to stone so it all matches! Most saliently, though, it’s used for mating.

All Gorgons appear female, though some are futas. Gorgons can (and do) have sex the normal way, but that’s not how they make more Gorgons. Gorgons mate with each other through petrification: they attempt to stone each other, and the one who succumbs to the other’s power first will become a statue that will ever so slowly grow larger with pregnancy, gestating for decades or even in some cases a bit over a century, and returning to flesh when they are ready to deliver their eggs containing their baby Gorgons. The stronger a Gorgon’s petrification power, the longer their victims will be turned to stone, the faster they transform, and the more durable they will be as stone -- take a sledgehammer to a powerful Gorgon’s statue and the hammerhead will shatter. Since a gorgon will be turned to stone to reproduce, it’s in their best interests to find a partner who is really, really powerful so they will be safe. Hopefully one who is interesting so you see some neat stuff in their cave. 

Since Gorgons are very solitary creatures, only seeking each other out to mate and only doing that rarely, Gorgons adorn the outsides of their lairs with petrified victims to show off the power of their gaze: humans who flee in terror or raise to strike them show that they were petrified quickly, and the Gorgon who did it is quite powerful and fearsome and a good mate.

**Algamathykos History II: Euryale and Eratia**

So Eratia was a warrior woman, a mercenary, serving various sorcerer-kings and their interests until she was exiled for her exhibitionism and promiscuity, cast into a raft in the great sea to fend for herself. For days she drifted, until one morning, half-delirious from seawater, she landed on the shore of a tiny rocky island with several statues of terrified people. She knew something had to be up, statues don’t occur naturally, so she took her sailor’s knife and waited in ambush. Euryale, the Gorgon who lived there, soon arose to see what had washed up, and Eratia jumped her the moment she left the cave, badly wounding her eye. Euryale could not turn Eratia to stone with only one eye, but she could and did smash Eratia’s leg with a stone club. Eratia fell, Euryale moved to finish her off, Eratia nailed the Gorgon in the chest hard enough to crack some ribs, and both women were rolling on the ground in pain declaring “Ow ow ow fuck god damn it ow okay time out TIME OUT FOR FUCK’S SAKE!”

Neither could stand, and with nothing to do but talk, Eratia asked what was up with the statues. Euryale explained her people’s abilities and reproduction, that these terrified humans were proof of the power of her gaze, that she might attract a mate.

And Eratia, a passionate exhibitionist who loved to display the artistic beauty of her body, saw the opportunity of a lifetime.

The hostility passed, as even when the immediate pain subsided both of them clearly needed the other to survive. They began to cooperate. Eratia pushed herself on a litter to the beach to go fish, and Euryale prepared water for them (her gaze was still strong enough for this, thankfully: salt petrifies easily, so use the petrifying gaze on seawater and the salt turns to stone well before the water will, the stone sinks to the bottom, and then the rest is fresh water.) And the whole time they spoke of the Gorgon’s ways. Though neither remembered the exact words they used, Aechus’s play “Euryale and Eratia” depicted it as such:

 _Eratia:_ Oh, what tragedy! That my host has such gifts to offer yet knows not their value. Were my people to know, they would shower you with riches, fair Euryale.

 _Euryale:_ The fuck are you talking about, riches? Half the humans who discover us immediately try to kill us.

 _Eratia:_ One could hardly lay blame, to see the galleria upon your home! What woman, man or child would wish to be frozen in terror, to be trapped in dim, dreaming nightmare? And ho, what do the Gorgon do with humans once their stone has passed?

 _Euryale:_ I mean, when they’re about to turn back, I mostly drop them in the ocean so they drown. Less hassle.

 _Eratia:_ A fate all would rather avoid! But, fair Euryale, what woman, man or child would not wish to become a work of art? A model of beauty admired by all, spoken of in far away lands? To be seen so completely, to be so helpless against the lustful gaze, yet to be so impervious to its harms? To know one is exemplar of the Truth of Beauty?

 _Euryale:_ … Could you repeat that? I think I had something crazy trapped in my ear.

 _Eratia:_ And what Gorgon-wife would spurn the Gorgon who created such art, to know her mate would be so powerful and brilliant that humanity asks to be turned to stone by her gaze? Who of anyone would doubt the quality of one such as this, one who commands such loyalty and respect?

 _Euryale:_ ...Huh. If my statues weren’t of the unwilling… it would still show off my power… but then the other Gorgons might also think “ooh, she needs them to stand still to petrify them, maybe I could get the better of her and turn her to stone,” and they’d be way more likely to try their luck…

 _Eratia:_ Indeed! It truly was providence of the Gods that led me to injure your eye, fair Euryale. I offer this to you: When your eye has healed, and my leg mended, turn me to stone as your willing art. Then take me to my destination, city of Phyra. Show me to the wealthiest you can find, nay, show me to the Queen, and offer her right to display your work so long as she credits you as its creator. You will find wealth and mates beyond your dreams. And I will find adoration and lust beyond mine.

 _Euryale:_ Well, I mean, I’d turn you to stone after we went to Phyra so you wouldn’t sink the boat, but this is actually seeming like a good plan.

It was, in fact, a pretty good plan. And when Eratia returned to flesh, she spilled the ouzo on the whole thing.

**Gorgons Of Algamathykos II**

Euryale had found wealth beyond imagining, and even ways to spend it. Her home was an opulent den, with plush carpeting and pillows everywhere, adorned with art from far-off lands, regularly supplied by dead drops of exotic meats and spices. Her galleria was now filled with statuary of beautiful people posing for her, those who discovered her secret and wished to join outside of Kalliti’s patronage. More importantly, her home held not one, not two, but THREE petrified Gorgons carrying Euryale’s children. One of them hadn’t even TRIED to petrify her back, and instead struck an erotic pose herself, becoming the centerpiece of Euryale’s home. Yes, word of Euryale’s prowess had spread even to other Gorgons, and they indeed came to see and make a mate of the famous artist.

(Her existing, terrified statues were quietly smeared in olive oil and reverted to flesh, and told “Okay here’s a little sack of gold for your trouble. Tell anyone about what happened and I’ll break your fucking knees and petrify them that way.”)

The other Gorgons who had been sought out by other patrons were surely in similar situations, though none quite as rich as Euryale. But Euryale was growing older, and her gaze was weakening; she had begun bribing other Gorgons who clearly overpowered her to buzz off so she could stay in this situation. She had a nice cozy life she wanted to hang on to.

Once Eratia had returned to flesh, she regaled her observers with the whole tale, beaming with pride at how revered and lusted after she had been, weaving honeyed tales of the pleasures of being unyielding stone. Kallita had once agreed to reveal the secret of her sculptor in due time, but she was making so much money, she had so much prestige, how could she let it slip? And once other city-states started getting their own Gorgon sculptors, well, they were all lying too, but if she admitted the statues were once living people then SHE would look like a fraud in front of everyone! She’d be ruined, and Euryale’s wealth would dry up! They had to keep the lie going, they were in too deep!

Kallita was denounced as a liar, cast from her throne, though obviously the assessment of her rule has become positive in the view of history. Then the people of Phyra began to seek the Gorgons, to seek Euryale, and hold her responsible for this grand deception. Was the jig up?

Hell no, they loved that shit.

**Algamathykos History III: Up To About Nowish**

Rather than be consigned to ignominy, the popularity of Gorgon sculptures EXPLODED. They were still beautiful, weren’t they? Timeless and erotic and awe-inspiring and even more interesting now that you knew a human mind was in there, seeing you look upon her, drinking in your gaze while unable to move? And now people know where to get them! The islands were swept, special teams of sailors commissioned to hunt down every single Gorgon wherever they may lurk and shove a patronage contract in their faces. Gorgons became celebrities, for they did indeed pass on part of their artistic signature to their subjects: their choice of of model, of pose, the material they became, the sheen, the cast of the eyes, whether they left the clothing intact or stoned, what manner of illusion of life they may want to evoke or to deny… Sorcerer-kings gave way to wealthy merchant-princes whose fortunes were made by the prestige and quality of their art. The petrified became symbols of status, not just wealth but respectability, majesty, to display the number of beautiful people who willingly became their decorations.

Public squares were adorned with the petrified. The homes of the powerful and wealthy were adorned with petrified beauties, some serving as furnishings as well as decoration. Statues were traded back and forth between owners. The petrified models themselves basked in the admiration and lust of their onlookers, and became prestigious in their own right. So beautiful, so poised, she was chosen to become a statue! Oh, I hear her next project is going to be with Stheno, I can’t wait to see what they will create! Oh, but have you heard, Phanketo is letting herself be stoned with child so that her time in flesh will sync up with Aglaia, and they can continue collaborating! They have such a unique perspective, they work so perfectly together! And of course let’s not neglect to mention that up-and-comer Medusa, who really seems poised to shake up the world of statuary!

Petrified models were exalted, praised, desired both for their beauty and prestige. The Gorgons who made them were all given patronage and admiration and prestige and as a result many of them became fucking _insufferable_ artiste-types. Their work grew more sophisticated and elaborate: in addition to single beautiful figures, what about pairs, trios, frozen in moments of joy or ecstasy? What about entire scenes frozen in timeless stone, telling the story of a tragic play by the meticulously supervised positioning and body language? Sculpting magic was developed and refined, allowing human artists to shape the stone flesh of statues into ever more beautiful and alluring forms. Could you turn my lips and nethers into something a little more pliable, maybe something that looks like rose gold, so any observer can fuck my frozen body if they please? Many possibilities were open, many frontiers explored. 

As time passed, philosophy and science developed, the world opened up, and many things changed. Algamathykos went from a scattered collection of city-states to a single Republic; its people lost faith in their gods as science gave them new understanding. Arts of all kinds -- novels, drama, painting, music -- were refined to better seek the Truth of Beauty and speak to the heart. But Algamathykos’s love and lust for statues never went away. The public forum may now be gone, and a shopping mall stand in its place, but at every intersection there’s a beautiful woman turned to stone for the shoppers to awe at. Television shows profile the homes and collections of prodigious statue-collectors, gossip tabloids and entertainment periodicals hungrily lap up news of Gorgon artist’s plans. Most people in Algamathykos have never been a statue, but they see them every day, suffusing every moment of public life. Everyone has a few they love aesthetically, or lust for carnally. Even after the introduction of television, statuary is still by far the most popular form of entertainment in Alagmathykos, whether chaste all-ages displays or lurid adult-only fare where interaction is highly encouraged. Every time a model’s unmoving stone breasts are glazed with semen, her open mouth stuffed with turgid flesh, she can feel it, and she will love it.

**Gorgons of Algamathykos III: The “And The Rest” Crowd**

Gorgons were of course much more able to contact each other to reproduce once they were “outed”, and much better able to work out who was going to carry whose children and how they would be watched over, so their numbers grew. They are still rare, but most people have at least met one. They became “common” enough that some, weak-gazed, were passed over for artistic patronage, and just had to live like normal schlubs, maybe petrifying friends and neighbors for a little bit to enjoy what it feels like. But this created another frontier in which Algamathykos could expand: With Gorgons who could be contacted without schlepping over to a little rocky artist nest island, ones with short-lived weak gazes, humanity soon figured out they were an incredible boon to medical treatment. A human who has been turned to stone is a problem that you have a lot more time to solve than a human who is gushing blood, and a human mage-sculptor can take plenty of time to get surgical removal juuuust right without the patient’s organs wiggling around and squirting fluids all over. Algamathykos has, without a doubt, the best trauma medicine in the world.

Weak-gazed Gorgons have commercial use as well. A long-running ha-ha-only-serious joke in Algamathykos was that petrification was a make-work program for rich harem owners: when you have too many girls to ever use, you turn four to stone and tell the fifth to dust them, and you’ve just made five new jobs. This actually happened more than one might think outside of Algamathykos, but now with weak Gorgons around for casual use, everyone can get in on the fun! From brothels to massage therapists to maid cafes, businesses that depend on individual service will offer a galleria of petrified servants in lovely poses, on pedestals engraved with their vital information, for customers to browse and choose their favorite servant. Slather her in olive oil, then take her to the bath to help her clean, and enjoy your statuesque beauty waiting on you, laying her hands on you, or just taking you on a chaste but enjoyable date -- anything you desire. When your time is up, take her back to the galleria and help her strike a pose, and know that she will be waiting, eagerly petrified, for your return.

With such a degree of integration and prestige, Gorgons were bound to have other effects on humanity beyond those they chose. Nowadays, more and more Algamathykans are being born as the “Serpent-kissed”, both a blessing and a curse of Gorgon-touched heritage. It is formally known as “Catalytic Petrified Catalepsy Syndrome” and is introduced into a bloodline by a Gorgon bearing a human child or a human being petrified while pregnant, but does not manifest in every generation. The Serpent-kissed have an affinity for turning their flesh to stone -- they can and will petrify for short periods without being subject to a Gorgon’s gaze. Those who practice and master their condition can turn to stone willingly, some can even partially petrify only certain parts of their bodies. Those who hone their magical talents can even petrify others, by touching them with their own stone bodies. But the condition also tends to cause sudden petrification when startled or overcome with strong emotion, capturing them in moments of triumph or emotional vulnerability. 

Though they also can turn to stone at the height of orgasm, that’s not really considered a bad thing there.

* * *

_A sunset is nice, nice enough to share. That is why she is here. A fair woman, alabaster, on this unassuming bench at the shore, arm extended to welcome someone to sit next to her. The sun sets in front of her every evening. She never moves from the seat, she never speaks or breathes, but her warmth is palpable. Admire the view with her. Take a picnic, rest your lunch in her lap. Lay your head upon the smooth alabaster surface of her neck and just rest your eyes a moment. Talk. She’s always listening. She’s a great listener._

* * *

_Stretch… finger at the mark there… hold it, she’s looking… she’s looking… she’s looking and looking and it feels nice it’s like a tingle no it’s the opposite of a tingle an antingle sliding outward and it’s cool it’s smooth I’m the underside of a pillow and it doesn’t feel like I’m stretching because I can’t move but don’t want to so cool and crisp in the air and in me and up goes the sheet and down comes the sheet and the crowd and the applause and they are all looking at me looking at me look at me_

* * *

_“Begging Cockslut. Model: Sofia Giorgaina.” The statue kneels, gilded mouth open and sucking. Her hands outward as if offering._

_Desma unbuttons her pants, frees her cock, stuffs it between those inviting golden lips. So tight, her mouth is made of stone, so’s the throat behind it, but the gold yields just enough, coaxing her further and deeper and faster. Desma facefucks her stone Sophia, filling her then painting her with hot cum._

_Semen drools from Sofia’s face into her cupped hands, gathering a pool. Desma stuffs a tip and a love note into the bulging box at the statue’s base._

**Algamathykan Characters**

Algamathykan humans have modern Greek names and surnames; Gorgons have names of Greek mythological figures and their surnames are derived from who patronized their ancestors.

Gorgons have an obvious reason to go out abroad: inspiration. For they are ahhhhhhhtists, daaaaahhhhhhhling. For a long time it was considered tasteless to photograph a Gorgon’s sculpture, it doesn’t capture the essence of being there in person, but it is certainly allowed as a dispatch from a Gorgon in the field to provide a tantalizing preview of what they are working on. Still probably a good idea to have some kind of cargo service on call, to pick up any statues you make that you plan to bring home -- of course, maybe you want to leave some behind to enrich the locals.

Most Gorgons who go adventuring, however, are probably not well-funded and don’t have patronage contracts. Because if you did, you’d be at home in the lap of luxury. So you probably have a comparatively weak gaze, or a lack of respect, or both; maybe you are trying to prove your artistic merit to someone who turned you down or scoffed at your work.

Gorgons don’t need to just leave their subjects turned to stone, petrified with pleasure, for others to see and long for (but that sure is great too!). The old joke really is true: if a Gorgon or her friends are accumulating a large harem, she will often keep most of them petrified and “on reserve” until needed… and have her own fun with them, of course. 

Or, maybe you just thought “adventuring types get into situations where turning things to stone, even for a shorter time, is very useful; I bet I can make some money that way.” People have had worse reasons to go adventuring into impossible jungle temples. 

Algamathykan humans may have similar motives: they may be “talent scouts”, or some form of non-sculpting artist themselves (statuary is by far the most popular form of art but it’s not like other arts are neglected) out for inspiration. If you’re Serpent-Kissed, maybe it’s just a medical condition you have learned to deal with, but you may have gone adventuring for the same reasons as a “tactical Gorgon”: not only can you also turn things to stone temporarily, though for a shorter time than even a weak-gazed Gorgon, but your ability to turn your own flesh to stone allows you to endure damage much better than most ordinary beings. If you turn a limb to stone and it gets hit too hard and breaks off, the broken-off part will remain petrified even after the part attached to you returns to flesh. You can jam the petrified limb back on and it will heal and re-attach, but I’m not gonna lie, it’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker and you might get scars or divots from tiny stone shards you weren’t able to find and put back in. Still better than getting your limb maimed the old-fashioned way.

Even for those who go out for purely monetary reasons or employ their talents strictly for utility, you’re at least a little bit of an artist. You take pride in your craft, whatever form it manifests in. Maybe you are dominant, maybe submissive, but in either case that’s how you prefer to work. You have something to say, something to express to the world. If you’re going to petrify a ravening beast before it tears an explorer limb from limb, or turn your flesh to stone to avoid poisonous gas, then by the gods those statues you make are going to express something about fear and the ephemeral nature of being! Art is where the Truth of Beauty lies, your whole life must be art!


	5. Brutally Honest: Orcish Children of Zendigiish

_(Content warning: rough sex, free use, violence, pseudo-rape: actions that have many qualities in common with rape but are consensual, incredibly uncomfortable cultural misunderstandings, anarcho-capitalism, waaaaaaaaagh)_

“The truth hurts.”

“Truth is like gold: it is not grown, but washed away of all that is not truth.”

“Seek truth in all things.”

“Anything that can be destroyed by the truth, deserves to be.”

“If it is the truth that someone can be taken as a public sex doll, to express this truth is virtuous.”

Okay, hang on, let’s maybe back up to that last one.

**The Orcs**

The various bands of green-skinned, muscular, sharp-tusked Orcs who call themselves the “Children of Zendigiish” on the steppes of Talai-Gurvik, valuing truth and power above all else, practically embody the phrase “brutal honesty”. They have no natural magic and so are unimpeded from learning intentional magic, and are surprisingly good at it. Orcs are powerful. Orcs are fearsome. Orcs are mighty warriors. Orcs are proud of all of these things.

What the Orcs are not proud of is a simple fact: Orcs never, ever, ever lie. They are not proud of this in the way that one is not proud of not defiling the dead. It is simply the obvious bare minimum standard of conduct. Truth is what matters to Orcs, truth is the only thing that matters. One cannot know what is true until it has been tested. More important than even their religion is the simple idea that in conflict, the strong triumph over the weak, truth triumphs over lies, the worthy triumph over the undeserving. Thus, anything that is NOT proven through conflict and struggle is valueless. 

Not simply leadership, but also sex and companionship.

Sex with an Orc is like a fight, a brutal fight where the only goal is to bring the opponent to orgasm and tire him or her out before you, so that you can have your way with them. Orc sex involves knee strikes, submission holds, full nelsons, and the occasional elbow drop. Whether you win or you lose, what happened was what deserved to happen, and your orgasm or companionship has worth because it was tested through struggle. Of course, not all sex is about companionship: to conceal sexual feelings through inaction would be a lie, and if someone COULD be taken and used as a public sex doll, then that is the truth, and revealing the truth is virtuous. Orcish sex is often as public and casual as it is violent, and onlookers may join on any side they wish.

**Psych-orc-logy**

All Orcs are dominant, or trying to be – though they accept when they are dominated, because that means they were weaker and should have been dominated. All Orcs are sadomasochistic, deriving enjoyment from inflicting and receiving pain as part of conflict, the same sort of satisfaction one has in the pain and exhaustion after the best workout of your life: you have pushed yourself to the limits of your abilities, shown where they are, maybe even expanded them. No matter where those limits were, no matter if you win or lose, it is good to reveal the truth of where you stand relative to your partner/s. An Orcish woman or futa has no special neurology making the penetration of the cervix any less painful, yet this is a common and desired part of Orc mating, because the pain itself is pleasure as they have pushed their body to the limits of what it can accommodate or endure.

Outsiders view Orcish sex as rape, and Orcs accept this definition and take pride in it, but there’s a key miscommunication there: the Orcish concept of “rape” is the definition of “sudden and violently forceful sex,” but does not contain the concept of “non-consent”. Non-consensual sex is a horrible crime, but the word they use is a combination of “theft” and “deception” (their foulest epithet). Orcs fight off their paramours because otherwise it wouldn’t be rewarding. Not fighting is a sign of disinterest, and any halfway-respectable Orc will back off at a sign of disinterest. This has led to some very awkward and uncomfortable cross-cultural situations, but since saying “No, stop it” is also a clear expression of non-consent, that’s usually as far as it goes.

An Orcish woman who was standing in line at the bank before being pulled aside and violently gang-banged by five other Orcs should feel no sorrow or shame. Those other Orcs won and thus deserved to, and it is good to know that she could not defeat all of them put together, even if she was not expected to. Of course, while this outcome is the truth, it is also a pretty trivial one; we could have guessed it. So perhaps when one sees a gang-bang, one will join on the other side. While relationships must be tested, they shouldn’t be tested constantly; how would anyone get anything done? How insecure are you that you must constantly test everything, do you fear that others will find you wanting? Different tribes take different stances on how often is appropriate to “re-test” sexual dominance. The areas where they wait a long time between “tests” are often visited by other races. So are the ones where they re-test all the time, by members of other races who know what they’re about.

Now, one might think, given this emphasis on constantly retesting personal relationships through violence, brutal and sudden sex, and proudly claiming the title of “rapist”, that Orcs are evil, terrible savages who bring destruction and misery to everything. Actually? Orcs are pretty cool people. They’re the kind of straight shooters you would imagine them to be, with no pretense or real hostility. They understand that other peoples seek truth in different ways than they do, and while they think those ways aren’t as good, they still respect them from a distance. They will find alternate ways to test truth and might with other people if requested, no complaints. They help the weak and the sick; after all, what useful thing does it prove to know that this Orc can triumph over that Orc when the second is delirious with hunger? Their tribal groups are tight-knit, mutually supportive, and open to anyone who wants to adopt Orcish ways. The group may gang-bang one unfortunate Orc -- or even a human -- until she is bruised, oozing cum from every hole, barely able to walk, but then they will take care of her. There’s always a next time, and she can become stronger, and what kind of monsters would they be to not allow her the chance to triumph again?

**Hist-orc-ry**

The Orcish lands are harsh, poor in natural resources, and teeming with great and terrible monsters and magical beasts. Orcs have tamed the wolflife Wargs as mounts and companions, and hunt the other great beasts for their meat and the honor of proving that they deserved to triumph against them.

In times past, Zendigiish was the most powerful Orcish warlord of the past and therefore the most righteous; she was the only one strong enough to have all bands of Orcs accept her dominance, and so proclaimed all Orcs to be her progeny in spirit -- though not genetically, that would be a lie. She united them from random bands of warriors who mostly fought each other, to a people who would test each other’s worthiness but unite for common good. 

In those days, Orcs WERE the horrible, violent blights upon the world they might be thought to be. Their ways of constant war left burning ruin in their wake and as much as they sought the truth, from these conflicts they learned nothing. But Zendigiish was not only a powerful warlord and a charismatic leader, but a philosopher of truth. Her tribe accepted her ideas about how Orcs may interact with truth, how and when it needed to be tested, and how it was the mark of insecurity and doubt in one’s ability to know truth to constantly test one’s boundaries. Other tribes were constantly unseating their own leadership, where Zendigiish gained the respect of her followers so that they would not often feel the need to try and unseat her. With her time freed up, she made great strides, and thus established that to be able to do anything she cannot be tested constantly. She established a chain of command, loyal followers who believed in her leadership and who knew she could defeat them; anyone who would challenge her had to go through them first so she would actually have time to lead. She also introduced the idea that while physical challenge was the best way for the worthy to triumph over falsehood, it was not the only way. Perhaps one Orc may be physically inferior and thus less worthy in general, but perhaps some other aspect they possess, tested in some other way, may be worthy of exaltation.

The other Orc warbands could not stand up to Zendigiish. Her people were unified, well-fed, well-rested, well-led. She swept through the other warbands with ease, and therefore proved that her methods were objectively correct. They may have fought fiercely to prove themselves, but once beaten, the Orcish tribes had no resistance whatsoever to adopting her methods and philosophies. They did not merge their tribes, but worked in her ways, taking her words as very true and good ideas. Instead of fighting each other, Orcs began to raid nearby settlements of humans and Elves, seizing their resources by proving they deserved it more. But this did not sit well with Zendigiish and her most loyal converts: was it not part of her philosophy that everyone has some aspect of truth to reveal even if they may not be as worthy in general? Killing the weak meant they had no chance to become strong and uncover a truth only they could. Already, some humans had begun to join Orc tribes. If they could learn to expose truth, these other ones could too. So the Orcs began to establish rules of conduct, limiting their conflict. They would take slaves when possible instead of killing their opponents, and when a slave proved they could defeat their master, they would be allowed to walk free or join the tribe. 

It was around this time that Zendigiish died, an old woman with a life well-lived. Though she was purely female, this did not stop her from dominating and claiming others, defeating them and then forcing them to sire her child. The extended family she was surrounded with was proof of her prowess, and thus her worth. Because of her, an Orc’s lineage is only counted through the dominant partner, no matter what gender they were, if it happens outside of a marriage. 

Zendigiish’s children moved on to gain leadership of many other tribes, and though they could not unite as she did, and their ways were not as quickly and universally adopted, they continued the work Zendigiish started in refining the Orcish way of warfare. It was soon established that slaves could only be taken from those who actively fought the Orc raids, because they thought they could beat the Orcs, and therefore, the answer to that question needed to be known. Those who did not fight implicitly answered the question, and thus it was not a pressing issue. Taking Orcs as slaves after defeat was completely acceptable, as they had been defeated, and thus deserved it. Conflict was pointlessly destructive, and too much was lost in the raiding process. Orc emissaries would approach the settlement and notify them of the raid, so that they could prepare for a conflict that would best accommodate their situations. They could pay a small amount of their food and wealth, a portion of what they would lose anyway in open conflict, to choose a champion to fight an Orcish champion to decide how the raid would have gone. Indeed, sometimes the humans won, getting to keep the rest of their supplies and winning an Orc slave, though it was never universally decided if they could use the Orc as their champion in later raids. You could pay a larger portion of your spoils to choose a non-combative or non-physical means of deciding the raid’s result, a game or race or some other form of competition. 

Then, of course, villages began to report that their own supplies were still besieged by bandits who were taking what the Orcs could have won, who were weakening them and leaving them unable to provide the best fight they could against their Orcish raiders. And that some of them had to pay taxes to distant lords who were not providing them protection, taxes that the Orcs could take instead. Inside of two generations, the settlements they were raiding had mostly become Orcish protectorates with a highly ritualized means of gathering tribute, each unique to the tribe that was most closely involved. Their relationships were the most pleasantly and beneficially antagonistic they could be, which is very Orcish indeed.

No matter how agreeable they are, though, don’t lie to them. Ever. They will kick the living shit out of you.

**Orc-veryday Life**

Violent, sudden sex isn’t constant in Orc lands, but you will at least see it frequently. Orcs will mark their skin and the skin of those they defeat with indelible ink, offering testament to their respective triumphs and losses. The ink can’t be washed off without special solvents, but it will fade in time (faster or slower depending on the recipe used, in accordance with the tribe’s traditions), and it’s generally accepted that someone with still-dark ink has been tested recently enough that it’s not really proving anything to go at them again. Washing it off, then, has an obvious application.

Orcs do tattoo permanently: triumphant Orcs who are counting something permanently mark themselves with trophies of conquest. Notably, though most Orcs don’t aim to create children from their tests, those who do have a visible breeder’s mark and a running tally of children sired/born. Any children forcefully made outside of marriage are always the responsibility of the partner who lost, no matter if they sired or bore it, so your victory streak can keep going; only those who have visibly accepted the risk of breeding by displaying such a tattoo can be forcibly bred with. Orcs should feel pride in their victories but never shame for their losses, and sometimes often-defeated Orcs will make some kind of permanent tally of their defeats in a usually-covered area, the inner thigh or “tramp stamp”, to show their willingness to accept it and learn from it. Humans who live with Orcs will sometimes have permanent markings done as a sign of degradation, which Orcs don’t really get, but whatever, you do you.

Though Orcs want to be ready for sex at any time, it’s pretty cold up on those Orcish steppes, and Orcs are just as annoyed as anyone else by having to mend their clothing after a rough sex session. Orcish dress favors skirts or kilts that can be flipped up to expose the genitals at any time (or by any one), and the rest of their bodies are covered by furs over leather straps and harnesses which crisscross around erogenous zones but do not cover any of them. When clothes are torn off, the fur is removed and the straps stay; afterwards, the fur can be re-attached instead of having to go to the tailor every goddamn time you get fucked. Orcs invented tearaway clothing before they invented the loom.

Orc lands don’t have much to offer besides the Great Beasts, and Orcs are primarily nomadic, traveling in caravans to follow the herd patterns, making camp each night around a communal campfire, doing what they do in the light of the fire -- and away from it. Closer to the edges are small semi-permanent camps where meat and fur and the like is processed; Orcs move in and out according to their needs and sometimes will return to someone having taken up their residence, or even their neighborhood. There’s really only one way to figure out who gets to stay when that happens. Then, further out, are the villages of humans and elves that a few Orcs live in but are mostly visited by Orcs on a mission, who come in to do what they need and to prove what they need to with whoever they may come across. Non-Orcish denizens of these places ought to be prepared for this sort of thing.

The Orcish land and its protectorates mostly languished for most of history; their leadership was more stable operating under the Truths of Zendigiish but it still wasn’t stable-stable, even after they formally incorporated into a Confederacy. And they still didn’t have much on their land to do anything with. But as industrialization came to the world, Orcs realized a couple of great things: one, that the flesh and fur and bones of Great Beasts have a lot of magical and industrial applications, meaning once people knew about them they would pay handsomely. And two, the people who are all about internal conflict in which the worthy triumph over the lacking are really, really good at capitalism. Orcs are prospering like never before and you’re as likely as not to see them in traditional garb or incredibly gaudy clothing meant to show off their wealth (and get torn away without damaging it, of course). Why should they hide their prosperity? Would that not be deception?

**Mon-orc-gamy**

Of course, much has been said so far of how Orcs test each other in public, at random. And for a great deal of Orcs, that’s enough sex and romance. Many Orcs, however, are romantically monogamous -- their sexual “testing” has nothing to do with romance, of course, that’s not cheating on anyone. What is an Orcish marriage or girlfriend like? It is like having a best friend, best ally, the one you can always count on no matter how bad things get, someone who completes you and your life… who is also your sworn nemesis.

It is the responsibility and privilege of an Orc lover to bring out the best in their partner. The only way to do that is to challenge their limits so they may surpass them. Courtship isn’t just about proving yourself a lover, or proving your own might, but proving what a worthy opponent you are. (If you leave a hoodie with an Orc GF, don’t expect to get it back without a fight.)

Traditional Orc marriage ceremonies involved a fight between the spouses, and if it was over too quickly, the marriage was called off; though nowadays it’s just as acceptable to replace the physical brawl with some other contest of prowess that the couple highly values.

You may come home from work after a long day and be greeted with a bouquet of flowers as a spontaneous gesture of love. Or you may come home from work after a long day and be ambushed and put in a full nelson, also as a spontaneous gesture of love. You will constantly test each other’s defenses, poking for weaknesses. When you spend time apart, you will pursue each other in the most literal sense And when she wears you down, defeats you, catches you defenseless (or vice versa!) she will pin you to the wall and ruthlessly, brutally fuck you senseless. And then you will cuddle and she will apply ointment to any wounds you got and make sure nothing is sprained or strained and kiss you on the forehead and tell you what an amazing lover and amazing challenger you are.

And then maybe next time you will be the one chasing her. Or perhaps when she corners you, you reverse her hold and pin her against the wall. If the outcome wasn’t in doubt, why would you bother?

This is, of course, the most traditional form of marriage and courtship. Every couple is different, and every couple has their own particular balance of tender love and combative love. Honestly, if both of you have very stressful lives, there’s ways to make tender affection into a contest that’s no less tender. Can you open yourself up and expose weakness after having your guard up for so long?

But as Orc society becomes more progressive and widens its interpretation of the Truths of Zendigiish (and has more interracial marriages with partners who are obviously going to lose a fight to an Orc), its expression of romance and courtship expands too. Just like your marriage ceremony can be centered on any other contest of prowess, so too can your romantic rivalry take many forms. Your lover is your nemesis, and even if they aren’t constantly testing your physical might, they are constantly doing something to challenge you, thwart your plans, throw obstacles in your path for you to overcome. 

Sometimes this is large: are you an explorer, adventurer, mercenary? So is your wife and she’s your direct competition. Is there some figure above you that drives you crazy, someone you have a serious problem dealing with? Your girlfriend is now her best friend and she comes over once a week. But sometimes it’s small: Do you keep losing your keys? Well your girlfriend is now deliberately hiding them from you. Are you having trouble learning the Orcish language? Your wife is going to make sure that everyone you regularly meet is going to refuse to speak Common Tongue with you. You will constantly be faced with challenges from your rival, from which you will learn and improve and be the best you can possibly be.

**Intern-orc-tional Relations**

Orcs have been kind of thrust upon the world stage recently. In the past, they were mistrusted and merely tolerated outside of their own lands, and were known for picking too many fights and having recurring border skirmishes, really a nuisance in the side of more civilized peoples that it wouldn’t be worth it to clear out. As individuals they were treated with a healthy amount of respect both for their honesty and their ability to cave your head in, but not many people really liked them. They were unusual to have around, and while their particular ways of public sex could be navigated around, it was still something you had to deal with. And their devotion to honesty is uncompromising, making them come off as incredibly rude when they are trying to be respectful by not sugar-coating anything.

But now not only are they rich and a center of industrial production, they’re relevant. Most notably, they sponsored the appearance and acceptance of the Succubi into wider society, and global culture has adapted the Orcish standard for dealing with them: You should be proud of who you are, even though you were engineered for evil purpose to destabilize and destroy our world. You are entitled to all the freedoms, rights, and respect that are the rights of all sentient beings. But if you ever shapeshift away your horns to hide the fact you’re a succubus, we will kick the living shit out of you. (And if you don’t, and we try to mess with you anyway, an Orc will kick the living shit out of us.)

Orcs are go-getters and problem solvers. They don’t beat around the bush, they neither hem nor haw. They are good to have around to Handle Things. They make good allies, because even though they will still fight you while allied, they will never ever lie about their intentions, and you can plan for the fight ahead of time. They’ll work on your schedule. How does a Tuesday donnybrook sound?

Orcs have a basic mistrust of most other cultures, because they accept dishonesty, but it just means Orcs don’t trust the words of others right away. They can work out an understanding with people very easily: while your culture’s acceptance of dishonesty is disgusting, it’s you guys’s thing, so just don’t lie to us and we’ll be fine. That isn’t usually a problem, Orcs are distinct enough and their preferences widely known enough that people can know that. 

Orcs do utterly despise the High Elves, because their entire culture and conduct are based on pervasive dishonesty, and are often in conflict with other peoples who allow slavery. Not because slavery is wrong per se, Orcs still practice slavery, but slavery with no option for the slave to free themselves or take ownership of their owner is unconscionable, much less if the slaves are actually mistreated or kept in conditions that prevent them from flourishing.

The big sticking point, the elephant in the room when it comes to other peoples interacting with Orcs, is their “spontaneous courtship”. You know, their propensity to grab people at random and brutally fuck them cross-eyed. It’s not forbidden, because a lot of people are into freaky shit, but there are rules of conduct to follow when “testing” non-Orcs sexually. Never block all paths of exit. Just because you are honest doesn’t mean you have to speak like an emotionless robot, but when you talk dirty about the upcoming event make sure that you make explicit what you plan to do to them instead of assuming they know. If they express a desire for you to stop, clearly back off, and wait for them to either leave, say they didn’t mean for you to actually stop, or to attack you back. 

And after you leave a girl behind in an alleyway, wrecked, with cum drooling from all her holes, your messages on her skin to attest to your triumph... always make sure to slip her a nice little tip. Something to compensate her for her time -- non-Orcs don’t make their schedules with surprise sex in mind, and just because you are testing her worth through sexual conquest doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be considerate.

* * *

_”I’m going to enjoy this,” she growls as she mashes my face into the wall. I can feel the rough brick grinding against my cheek. I can feel her erect shaft already gliding against my buttocks._

_But she’s open. As she unzips, I slam my elbow into hers, freeing myself. She grunts, off balance. I sweep into her leg, and she falls to the ground, cock to the sky._

_In her stunned moment, I lock her wrists, and my exposed cunt is drooling above her undefended dick._

_You are going to enjoy this. But I’m going to enjoy it more._

* * *

_“Quit wiggling so much,” the Orc says, “you’re making the ink smear”._

_Her makeup is already smeared all over her face, made runny with sweat. The mixed jizz of five Orcs drools from her pussy, though only three pleasured themselves in her asshole. Her lipstick smeared all over her mouth by cocks, then the bottled water they gave her. Wiggling at all is quite a feat._

_“What are you writing?” she asks._

_“‘ORCISH FUCKHOLE’,” the Orc responds._

_“...I want something good, too.”_

_“Well, thanks to your wiggling, your back now says ‘AGAINST SEVEN ALONE, I DEFEATED TWO ANB WVOUMBEB THREF.’”_

* * *

_Light, subdued chit-chat and polite deference are the rule of the elegant party, which is why everyone watches the Orcish guest with morbid curiosity. She strides through the room with confidence, to the center: an array of wine goblets and fancy cheeses._

_One sip of the wine, her face turns to disgust, and she throws it to the floor. “This tastes like goat urine,” she declares._

_All around the room, everyone notices everyone else’s goblets are mostly full. Each of them thought they were the only one who hated it._

_She looks about for a mop to clean her mess._

**Char-orc-ters**

Orcs have a very typical naming style in most fantasy: harsh and guttural consonants, “deed names” about weapons and violence. If you want to be more structured about it, Hunnic names also fit. “Zendigiish” is derived from “Dengizich”, a son of Atilla who led the Huns in the fifth century.

Orcs are about proving truth through conflict and not about bullshit. You have an obvious role in any adventuring group, you hit things until they stop being a problem. But not all Orcs are warriors… okay, they are, but not all Orcs are _professional, full-time_ warriors. There are Orc lawyers, Orc artists, Orc chefs, Orc janitors. But all of them have that same underlying idea, that they are proving themselves and everything around them through challenge. And they are ready for some rough “surprise sex” at any time, on either end. 

If you think openly owning such an evil and shameful title as a badge of honor is hot, you may have a name like “Zagra the Great Rapist” (and if not, you can forget that entire element), but remember that you aren’t actually a rapist as other people see it. You care about consent, you always make sure they know that they may surrender and end the encounter right there, and ultimately you want both parties to be enriched and to learn from what you do. This is about bettering everyone by understanding truths about their limits. Unless you are very unusual, you don’t get outraged or indignant when you are defeated -- maybe you’re actually proud of the inner strength you helped your opponent discover!

You may decide that “anything goes” for anyone who tried to attack your Orc sincerely, and she may have her way with them as she pleases. If you are into that ‘ryona’ thing, you say that’s what the rule is, you go right ahead. But remember that there’s so much more to you than violence. You are someone that anyone would be lucky to have in their corner, and not just for your physical attributes. You’re a steadfast ally to all your friends, and your trust is unbreakable. You’re the very definition of ride-or-die. If someone needs a shoulder to cry on, you’re there, and your advice may not be the most tactful but it’s going to be the most direct and honest. 

The point of constant conflict is to derive the truth and allow everyone to improve. You are ultimately here to _help_ people. And win or lose, you’re ready for anything. 

Especially looking for more wins and losses.


	6. High-Maintenance Women: Titans of Monzani

_(content warning: mini-giantesses, size queen, worship, nipple penetration, unbirth, dedicated sexual service crews, plug suits, bodily enhancement, what if the Olympics were sexy but also instead of the Olympics they were Italian motorsport)_

From their lofty mountain perch, descended the Titans, the beings who spawned the Gods themselves. Towering over the humans around them, they passed the blessings of their wisdom, their magic, and their protection to their human supplicants, who worshipped and attended the Titans’ needs as was only right for beings of their stature and beauty. Against invasion, the protection of a Titan was impregnable, as mighty warriors were sent flying with a single kick from a Titan’s elegantly sculpted calf. Their supplicants spent their lives in testament to Titanic glory.

Then the invaders came anew, better armed, better armored. The elegant Titans would stand in defense of their temple-cities, only to find their bodies destroyed by trebuchet stones and pierced by ballista bolts, or toppled over by siege tower and trampled by cavalry.

On that day, Titan-kind received a grim reminder: that they lived in fear of humanity!

**The Titans**

Titans are much larger humanoids, averaging around 5-6 meters high, or a bit over 3 times the height of the typical human; they have human features and athletic builds but the pointed ears of Elves. Almost all Titans are female, and any female Titan can, with varying effort, turn into a futanari or back. Male Titans may be able to perform a similar transformation, but as all male Titans remain in Olympassi, they can just refuse to answer any questions about it. Most female Titans have the usual array of human skin tones but some females and all males come in shades of blue, red, or green.

The square-cube law is the bane of all large life forms: as you increase in size, strength increases according to cross-sectional mass, but weight increases cubically. A Titan is three times as tall as a human, which makes them 9 times stronger but 27 times heavier. (This is also why ants can lift over 50 times their own body weight, because they’re so small!) The natural magic of a Titan is what offsets this: Titans have innate biomancy, or control over their own physiology, that multiplies with their Titanic size and allows them to perform incredible feats of might and prowess. A single Titan can strike with the force of hundreds of men, chuck boulders like pebbles or fully grown trees like javelins, rend stone as if it was earth and earth as if it was water, or flip boats like children’s toys. But these feats come best in short bursts, after which the Titan needs to rest and recharge. This is where their human supplicants come in: a Titan can plow a field in minutes but to actually farm it would be too exhausting, so humans do that work and feed the Titan, forming a symbiotic relationship. Just boiling the water for a Titan’s pasta takes all day.

The power of a Titan’s biology extends to their fluids: a Titan’s milk and semen are infused with the essence of life, causing plants to grow, injuries to heal, age to (somewhat) reverse -- and a human to be more resilient, stronger, stretchier, and better suited to serving the Titan. Thus humans bring the Titan pleasure, and the Titan blesses them with the sticky, creamy essence of life. A Titan’s sweat or saliva won’t have nearly the same effect, but if you lick it you get kind of a buzz.

Because the symbolic energy of a Titan’s reproduction has been redirected to bestow this essence of life, their fertility rate is actually kind of low. Titans can reproduce with each other, of course, but it’s very rare for a futa’s seed to take root, and the males are more virile but sequestered away in their city for safety. The other way is more esoteric: a Titan can use her control of her body to extend an umbilical cord from her womb to attach to a human, pulling them into her body and making them her child. Inside the Titan’s pregnant womb, the human will be changed, adapted, molded to be a perfect servant to the Titan’s needs until they are reborn -- and able to bear or sire a true Titan child. Don’t worry, it starts out the size of an unusually big human baby, it just grows real fast from there.

There are myths of a secret inner circle of Colossi, beings who are as large to Titans as Titans are to humans, that guide the Titan people from within secret chambers of Olympassi. There are only rumors to support this idea, rumors and the fact that everything in Olympassi is built with enormous doorways and ceilings that make even Titans look small in comparison. There’s no evidence for it and it’s a silly old wives’ tale so stop asking about it.

**Titan History**

The tales of the Titans themselves say that they created the Gods of Algamathykos, but were cast out by their creation. This would make sense, there is a similar tale of Titans being cast out of Algamathykos, except they aren’t near each other. Human myth has a different story, that the Titans were crossbreeds of humans with incomprehensible giants who created the world and then left it. This is also not how crossbreeding works. Time Scooch.

Monzani is a mountain range in Symbi containing a river valley, rich with mineral wealth -- gems and gold, iron and iridium. It’s bordered to the north by the Tirreni Sea, to the east and south by the nation of Altia, and to the west by its rival Bayeux.

The Titan city Olympassi, a great and imposing metropolis of stone hewn as one piece from the living mountain, lies over the verdant valley, ensuring none may enter without the Titans’s blessing. They did not farm the land, for it was a task that as beneath them (and they couldn’t put in the sustained work to actually do it, but hush), and instead allowed great and terrible creatures to roam their lands, to multiply and spread before their Titanic game wardens culled them.

Well, as the legend goes, the Titans weren’t all that good at being conservationist game wardens, and they hunted the great blue oxen to extinction, mostly by punching them to death. Their main source of food gone, the Titans deigned to descend on the huddled, fearful masses of humanity that settled near Monzani, and offered them a deal: you feed us, bathe us, clothe us, fan us with giant fronds, and worship us; we shall in turn impart our blessing to you, grant you the essence of life that flows from us, shape your lands to suit you, and protect you from invasion.

And in the ancient era, this worked great. Every little hamlet had a Titan, and larger cities two, three, maybe five. Decadent grottos and glens were established for each city’s Titan protector, where they would laze about in their gigantic togas, all of their needs attended to by human supplicants. Fed, massaged, entertained with theater and literature, sexually stimulated -- not only do human hands stimulate cocks and clits with aplomb, not only do human bodies fed great deals of Titan milk and seed become stretchy enough to accommodate a Titan lover, but an adventurous human once tried to use her penis to please a Titan lover and found that a Titan’s sensitive breasts are not only possible to penetrate, but it feels _fantastic_ and stimulates milk-laden orgasm like crazy. Though they’d used arms and fists to great effect, it was still validating to discover a way a human could provide sexual pleasure to a Titan with their own penetrating fun bits.

The rulers at Olympassi collected a portion of tribute, sent the females where they would be needed, recalled particularly successful ones to reproduce and pass on their genes to a new generation. The Titans and their knowledge of stonework erected great walls to guard their home cities against invasion by outside kingdoms, eager for the material wealth of the Monzani mountains, eager to steal the blessings of life. The walls would stand to defend the humans, while the Titan would go out and destroy any threats to them.

A platoon of swordsmen could be easily kicked away by a Titan, they didn’t even need a weapon. They would sometimes come out to face invasion utterly naked, just for fun. Arrows and javelins would string like mosquitoes if the Titan even allowed her skin to be weak enough to penetrate it in the first place. Any invading force who brought a battering ram saw it picked up and swung around like a thwacking stick, scattering horsemen and infantry. The attacks came once a decade or so, they always escalated, but were just as easily thwarted. Life for the Titans and for Monzani was pretty sweet.

And then one fateful day, with an Altian army on the horizon, a Titan uttered the fateful words: “Hey, what the hell is that wooden sproingy thing? Oh, hey, is that a boulder launcher? Why would they… OW OW FUCK WHAT THE FUCK MAN DON’T FUCKING HIT ME WITH A BOULDER WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? YOU CAN’T -- OW! OW! FUCK, FUCK, GOD DAMN IT, OW! STOP THAT!”

**Titanomachy**

Monzani had rested on its laurels too long. They counted on the Titans’ innate strength and size to defend them forever, not thinking that their opponents would develop, grow stronger, learn to counter them. Some Titans stood agog, making that “a-buh a-buh a-buh” noise with their mouths, uncomprehending of the very idea that they might be threatened. They died pretty quick as the invaders from Altia pressed inward from the outlying plains into the mountains. And inward. And inward. Only the rocky, mountainous terrain stopped them from conquering as fast as they could walk. By the time winter fell, two thirds of the border region with Altia had fallen and the remaining cities overflowed with refugees both human and Titan.

Roads and forests froze over. The Altians prepared for another push when the snow thawed. The rest of the Monzani got to fucking work.

Monzani, both human and Titan, had no military doctrine to speak of. So they were gonna need to whip one up. Humans were allowed into Olympassi for the first time, as it had become the logistical center of the defense effort. Forces and Titan personnel were dispensed, experimental schematics distributed, by leaders who were very good at moving resources around but had no idea how to win a war. They didn’t even have any human foot soldiers! They didn’t even have a store of _weapons_!

But they did have a bunch of really good warlock-engineers and regular-engineers who knew how to scale things up to Titan size. They had pieces of armor and siege weaponry to reverse-engineer. And they still had Titans. The Titans just needed to improve with technology as the Altian invaders had. 

The Great Mobilization was a concerted effort the likes of which Monzani had never seen. Everyone in every town pitched in to the engineering and training that would be their only hope. Each city had its own Titans, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, proficiencies, all known intimately by its people. Those cities that had fallen, well, their people and their Titans were still here, they still knew how to work together. A Titan’s armament may take 30 times as much material as a human’s, but we expect it to take out a lot more than 30 invading soldiers, and we can completely custom-engineer it to our Titan’s body and skills. We can even use impractical designs that would be too inefficient to be operated by humans. The Titans themselves can help with the designs for their equipment, offer feedback and advice at every stage. All over Monzani, teams assembled to engineer their defense. Most often they would clean out the stables to use as a workshop, leading to the name for these engineer teams: “ _La Scuderia Gigantessa_ ”, or “The Giantess’s Stable”.

Okay, catapults lob huge boulders? Here’s a big metal shield to take cover in, that was easy. That giant crossbow, that’s a ballista? Okay, here’s a giant crossbow we designed. It’s not as big and doesn’t have the piercing power, but you can aim wherever you like, so it works a lot better with loads of antipersonnel grapeshot or incendiary explosives. This armor our invaders have is sturdy, but scaling it up to Titan size leaves it too fragile? We can use it as the basis of an armor exoskeleton, but use much more efficient and powerful runes of protection on the underside of the material to mirror the way it’s designed to deflect impact, and custom-rig them to your own magical profile. Human pikes focus their energy on a single point, and that’s no good for you fighting a horde? Try this, it’s basically a giant bladed pushbroom. Okay, you, it’s hard for you to get your footing on the mud, so we’re arming you with this colossal whip -- it’s color-coded along its length, so when you knock troops away with it, we’ll know what distance to fire our catapults at; they may be inferior to the invaders but we’ll have much better aim. We expect attack by sea? Okay, so you get these flippers on your hands and feet to move through the water and a mouthpiece with a spell of breathing on it; swim under the boats and punch holes in the bottoms of them. 

Okay, you need to get into fighting shape. Our dancers who entertained you with their grace, they’re going to teach you their coordination and dexterity. When you aren’t dancing, you’re swinging this tree into this wrecking ball. See how well you can brace against it when it swings back. Anyone without any other applicable skills, put some pots and pans on your heads, because our Titan’s going to learn to aim by thwacking you with this giant pool noodle. Getting too tired? Your biomancy may be crapping out on you but that doesn’t mean we can’t tune it up too. Oh, sure, you’ll get your relaxation and supplication, once you’re done training. I wanna see 6 solid hours of practice from you and then the most beautiful maidens in town will all get elbow-deep in there until you’re cross-eyed. You need to be near orgasm to have the most energy? We’ll whip up a breastplate with dildos mounted inward and a teaser belt, but remote-release cold water to splash you with when you get too aroused, keep you perfectly edged the whole time.

It was a harsh winter, a long one, the longest any had seen in generations. Food stores were running out, homes were being hacked for firewood, and up until the last second the scuderia were still working out the kinks of their designs. Spring at last came in late May. Altia advanced. And thanks to the efforts of the scuderia, they were fought off by battle-ready Titans wearing cutting-edge technology and magic, operated as crew-served weapons by entire teams to keep them fighting at perfect efficiency. The war didn’t go perfectly, indeed the Monzani had a lot of systems that broke down the moment they hit an actual battlefield and a great many inferior replications of their opponent’s arms, but they eked out the win all the same. Altia was repelled from the lands they threatened, the lands they had invaded were taken back, and maybe Monzani got a bit more land on the way back. Bonus! The new ways of Titan warfare had defended the homeland and the relationship between human and Titan had forever changed: now they would know each other as equals, members of a common team with common goals. 

While the Titans were no longer seen as unquestionable city-goddesses, they didn’t mind, because they felt fucking _great_. They had endurance like never before. With human support magics, their own natural magic wasn’t so occupied with keeping their joints from crushing themselves and their circulatory systems from overtaxing. It was like they had been sick, been asphyxiating for so long they forgot wellness, and all of a sudden they were cured!

**The First Formula and the Grand Prix**

Western Monzani had been spared the assault, but Bayeux could invade at any moment, so it was time to distribute the blueprints and schematics of the most effective Titan armaments, tested and proven in battle, so the Western border could secure itself with ease.

Slight problem: every _scuderia gigantessa_ had its own methods and techniques in their engineering, adapted to the individual quirks and circumstances of their location and their Titan members. Opinions were split on everything from what alloys to use, how to combine arms, whether a Titan fights best at the edge of orgasm or cumming as often as possible, what cool-down and relaxation methods worked best for the pit crew to manage their energy levels, even what color their banners should be. 

What to do? Western Monzani didn’t want to be left to their own devices to make their own techniques, that was too risky. Nobody would back down when their pride was on the line. How would they know who to go with? The innocuous little hamlet of Le Mons announced it would hold a test: an endurance-orgy for Titans, gauging prowess and endurance by who could last the longest without passing out in a post-orgasmic heap. Whoever won, would provide the blueprints for Le Mons’s defense.

The Le Mons Endurance Trial was a disaster. It was announced too suddenly, Le Mons couldn’t handle the influx of visitors, the event ended before more than half the teams could show up and enter. The endurance orgy itself got messy and muddy and judges were constantly being plastered with pussy juice and futa spooge. 

But the Olympassi thought it was a great idea: let there be a test! A tournament! The sacred Monzani Valley would be opened, and upon it would be constructed competition grounds. An ultimate competition of athleticism, endurance, and engineering! Footraces! Orgasm denial time trials! A ball game! Mock battles! An endurance orgy! Marksmanship! Set up a bunch of fake straw soldiers and see how long it takes to knock them down! Swimsuit competition! The scuderia would battle it out for the Grand Prix, the great prize: to be known as the greatest warrior-artisan team in Monzani, who would create the ultimate blueprints, etched into the stone of Olympassi, the First Formula that all Titanomachy would be derived from!

(Also, Titans not in the competition would be stationed evenly around the border, so if Bayeux tried some shit, the guards could delay them long enough for the competition Titans to make it over from the middle of Monzani.)

The Grand Prix was just what the population needed after the scariest year and harshest winter of their lives. People massed in the Monzani valley, ready to cheer on their local teams, their favorite Titans. Villages who couldn’t field a whole team themselves would buddy up with neighbors, while cities large enough to host two scuderia would find themselves rivals. The greatest of Monzani came to prove their skill. Titans checked and re-checked their gear, their support teams came loaded with backup materials and magical stylus, and the teams drilled with each other again and again and again, ready for the ultimate test.

If Le Mons was a disaster, the first Grand Prix was an utter catastrophe. 

Nobody had built lodgings for the spectators, so entire tent villages sprang up overnight, slicked with mud and featuring way too few outhouses. The pond for the aquatic events had shrunk since inspection and was too shallow for Titans to swim in. Events were restarted and re-run several times, sometimes days apart, as more competitors showed up late and demanded do-overs. The competitor’s lodgings became a den of debauchery inside of 15 hours featuring every coupling imaginable; Valentina Alessandra, a crew member whose only official job was to hold a parasol to keep the sun out of her Titan’s face, went down in history as the first human to be spit-roasted by two Titan cocks. A feat witnessed by _thousands_ because the competitor’s village had no privacy walls. 

Nobody actually won, and that’s not even counting all the events that were re-run and had two or more winners. The team of Scuderia Forenzi claimed the most overall victories, but the most individual victories went to Bianca Wind-Graceful of team Scuderia Lucidia -- so was Forenzi the best team of engineers, or was it Lucidia, who fielded the best Titan? Combat and sexual events were hotly contested, but team Scuderia Fortissimo completely _obliterated_ everyone in all of the racing events, so does their dominance mean mastery of Titanomachy? What is the relative weight of each event, based on how directly it measures useful abilities? Oh, we never actually figured that out? Probably should have had that sorted.

So the first Grand Prix was a catastrophe that utterly failed at the goal it set out to do. Other than that, though, it was a smashing success! Everyone loved it! They loved rooting for their local scuderia, or their most beloved Titan. The economy, suppressed by the war, surged back to double what it was in its best years. All over the hallowed halls of Olympassi, slate surfaces were marked with odds and payouts for individual events. Adjusted for inflation, the largest single wealth transfer in Monzani history is believed to be when Lorenzo Twice-Blessed absolutely cleaned _house_ on a long-shot 27:2 bet in the three-on-three mock battle round. We didn’t have a clear winner or declare a First Formula? Great! Let’s all do this again!

The Titans in Olympassi quickly got to work planning the next Grand Prix, to happen in a few years. Bigger! Better! More organized! More sex! More gambling! Not to be outdone, the little hamlet of Le Mons announced it would be rerunning its competition: now it would be a solid 24-hour endurance orgy! People on the other side of the Altia and Bayeaux borders wanted to see for themselves. Everyone who had been on guard duty wanted to compete this time. Some of the Western Monzani scuderia ( _equipe_ ) had drawn up their own schematics and wanted to put their skill to the test in the next Grand Prix. Clearly this was going to be a huge event, one that would inhibit their ability to muster Titans in their defense, one they wanted to keep running. So emissaries from Team Scuderia Lucidiai and Team Scuderia Forenzi were sent to Altia and Bayeaux, to negotiate and/or threaten a peace treaty that would give Monzani time to run its Grand Prix again.

**Monsters from the Deep!**

Of course, Scuderia Lucidia found Altia in the midst of crisis. As anyone even passingly familiar with Altian history knows, this was when Altia was besieged by the terrifying many-tentacled Sea Colossi, towering monsters empowered by the Foul who emerged from the Tirreni to lay waste to all they found and kick over sand castles both metaphorical and literal. The effort against these creatures was the whole reason Altia made such a desperate play for Monzani’s resources. They maybe could have tried negotiation but they didn’t call her Mad Empress Margherita for the sake of irony.

Turns out? Big lady warriors with cutting-edge custom equipment backed up by dedicated support teams is exactly what you need to fight gigantic monsters emerging from the sea. Small and nimble enough to climb on a monster’s back or reliably aim for the eyes, but big enough that the monster will god damn feel it when they land a hit. Hardy enough that they would be wounded by the Colossi’s strikes instead of killed outright, so they could retreat and get fixed up by their support teams, who became known as “pit crews” for the fortified trenches they operated in. Better still, large enough that the Colossi registered them as potential mates, and a Colossus would often try to use its writhing tentacles to bind and impregnate a vulnerable Titan, leaving it wide open to a punch to the back of the head that’d launch its vertebrae out of its mouth.

The Titans wouldn’t say they _liked_ being violated by oozing tentacled beasts, but they wouldn’t say they _disliked_ it, either. It was, let’s say, “an experience”. And hey, if backup came a bit too late and a Titan was impregnated by the egg of a writhing Colossus, we havin’ omelets tonight!

The people of Altia were awed by the might and beauty of the Titan warrior teams, who defeated the invading Colossi all along the coasts as they made their way to the capital. The human support teams were absolutely drowning in pussy, and the Titans themselves got enough curious and adventurous suitors to nearly drown a few in their pussies. 

At last they reached the Imperial capital, now followed by a throng of fans. And they beat the living shit out of the invading force, routing them back to the water from whence they came. Negotiations for the peace treaty began when Bianca Wind-Graceful, coated in Colossus guts, leaned up against the Imperial Palace walls, inspected her blood stained fingernails, and said “Whew! This is a real nice city you got here. We just had to help out. Thought it would be an awful, awful shame if something happened to it.”

Mad Empress Margherita was recalcitrant, saying she would not negotiate and would have the Titans killed for insolence. But then she mysteriously died in the middle of the night! Beaten to death by a mysterious shovel! Negotiations went swimmingly after that. The outlying mountains of Monzani would become a part of Altia (though the western region would later peaceably swap sides to Bayeaux, who they always felt closer to), while the inner valley would remain an independent principality Altia swore to defend. Titans would be called on to defend the land from Colossi when necessary, because they were great at that! Titans would have guaranteed citizenship and right of travel, and all the citizens of Altia would have free passage as well! Maybe to visit Monzani for any upcoming events that may or may not be planned! And Altia wouldn’t be looting anywhere for its resources, because the Altian Empire is no more, and they were now the Serenissima Altia, a republic! Where all regions would have a voice in the Senate deciding how they would be treated -- and of course the Titan senators would get more votes because of how big they were! That only made sense, it’s just math! It has nothing to do with how intimidating they are! Or how oddly arousing that intimidating strength is when a Titan is giving you a look that says “I know you want to take a ride on this, and I know you got some perfectly good fists on you!”

The timing couldn’t have been better. With Altia’s troops bound to defend them instead of invade them, everything was freed up for a glorious and incredibly lucrative Grand Prix. Some historians believe the timing was too good to be circumstance: that the Titans in Olympassi used their hidden Colossi to somehow influence or command the Sea Colossi to step up their attacks at the perfect moment. The Titans of Olympassi had a response: “That’s nonsense! The names are just coincidence because they’re both very large. We wouldn’t be able to control anything, Titan Colossi have no relationship to -- I mean Titan Colossi don’t exist, what are you talking about, that’s crazy, this interview is over.”

**Titansports Today**

The second Grand Prix, years later, was a smashing success. People came from all around to witness the competition and were awestruck by the athletic and engineering skill on display. Monzani raked in the tourism dough. Banners were sold with the logos of the scuderia and equipe, and tapestries depicting Titans in intimidating or coquettish poses flew off the merchant tables. Other cities wanted to run their own events! And they could, as long as Monzani could get its metaphorical beak wet in the process!

The First Formula wasn’t decreed, but nobody cared at this point, and First Formula just became the name for the main circuit of events -- run in many prestigious cities so more people could spectate, and always culminating in a finale in the Monzani valley. The Le Mons 24-Hour Orgy was its own independent and respected event, indeed multiple circuits would spring up, focusing on different types of newly-christened Titansport. The Grand Prix would even serve as the inspiration for the Olympassic Games, a display of non-assisted humanoid athleticism that would eventually travel the world. 

As you might expect, Titans and Orcs get along great. Even before a bunch of Orcs became nouveau riche, Titansport was their jam. Athletic competition, deeply intertwined with sexuality, to prove who is the best? The exaltation of pushing a body to its limits? Sexual partners who can destroy you but you can still triumph over to prove great prowess? Of course they love it! Titans abroad are most often seen in Orc lands, where they can get the same pseudo-worshipping treatment from a tribe or company that they would at home. Orcish combative sex events have been a long-running and welcome addition to Titansport circuits. The week-long Eyegouge Gulch Invitational, where in each match a futanari Titan must blow her load in three out of her opponent’s five holes (pussy, ass, throat, and each breast) to be declared the winner, has been called “the greatest spectacle in Titansport”. 

Titans did indeed fight the Sea Colossi when they emerged, and were exported to face off with other giant monsters and beasts, and did so with valor and heroism. But let’s face it, there’s a lot more Titansport than there is monster-fighting. Titansport does not dominate the culture of Altia the way the Gorgon’s statuary is everpresent in Algamathykos, but it has a lot of passionate followers, and of course Monzani lives and breathes it. The mineral resources of the Monzani valley have long since been expended, but who gives a shit when you’ve got these swanky casinos no country can regulate and ski resorts to fleece the rich at. Cities in the wider Monzani region still have patron Titans, attended to by human supplicants, even though the magical effects of their fluids are not as strong as modern medicines and you could in THEORY do their physical labor with machinery, but fuck it. Titans are still worshipped in some places, but it is a low-key working worship relationship, the kind of worship where you snap and point at your Goddess and go “eyyyyyy” and she will snap and point and go “eyyyyyy” right back in a voice just as casual but louder.

Following Titansport has a reputation as a rich upper-class hobby, due to the cost of building suitable facilities, cost of flying around to every event, and the fact that Monzani itself is basically turning rich people upside down and shaking out their pockets. But there are fans to be found everywhere in every walk of life, with scuderia banners in their windows, or sleeping on Titan-sized body pillows printed with the picture of their favorite competitor. The Titans themselves are more numerous than ever before, and plenty of Titans now aren’t Titansport competitors, monster defense teams, or local goddesses: they have lives like anyone else. Well, mostly like everyone else, but if they live outside Monzani they kind of have to congregate together in cities that will build tall doorways and ceilings. And no matter where they go they will always love Titansport, bring their passion to their neighbors, and sometimes get into really long heated arguments about the latest weekly scuderia scandal.

**Titan Augmentation**

Titansport isn’t beloved just because it’s where Titans are most famous, either: Titansport is an incredible boon to Titan lives in general -- all Titans are now basically cyborgs thanks to their augmentations. Even if you can’t afford precision-engineered gear, the electromagical and mechanical enhancements to Titan physiology that the sport has developed are incredibly liberating even with do-it-yourself calibrations, allowing a Titan to experience health that her foremothers couldn’t even imagine. Even when they can’t remember a life before their augs, they still exalt in the absolute physicality they possess now, treating it as a wonderful gift. They upgrade their augs when they can, they develop their bodies because they can, and they will do cartwheels of athletic joy as often as they can get away with. And they’ll race ya. Come on, let’s race! I’ll make it fair, I have to go there and back three times before you get there once. That’s six times as long, you’ve got much better chances than I do!

Any Titan, no matter where, no matter how poor, can always count on a bare minimum of three augmentations: skeletal etching to reinforce their joints, cardiac fiber to empower their heart, and an intestinal ring to teleport waste from their bodies out into the ocean before they would pass it naturally. The first two are for the health and well-being of the Titan herself; the last one allows long-term butt plug use but is mostly for the health and well-being of everyone around her. But there are many, many more upgrades available. 

The current standard for high-tech is the “plug suit”, a shiny and skintight garment that covers the entire body from the neck down and serves as an easy interface mechanism for additional augments (thus lending it its name), with an optional pair of monitor clips that go on the top of the head. Commercial versions are widely available, benefiting from many of the enhancements of the cutting-edge models; notably, many come with a “condenser” module that allows a Titan to shrink to about 3 meters high so they can fit inside buildings not meant for them. It’s still kind of uncomfortable and makes them much weaker, so they don’t often use it, but it’s good to have the option. 

At the cutting edge of technology, the plug suit allows the pit crew to constantly monitor vitals and communicate with the Titan, and the clips even allow them to monitor brain activity and mana levels. Standard ports accommodate modular butt plugs or anal beads, any size of vaginal vibrator, and of course custom or standard nipple stimulators, completely secured to the body but easily removed to expose the flesh or swap out a new part. The suit itself massively enhances stamina and durability by optimizing blood and mana flow and circulates coolant to keep the Titan brisk and comfortable like she was in the peaks of Monzani -- the large port on the back can accommodate heat sinks if the temperature is too high, or a cool-ass jetpack if the temperature isn’t too high. Blood can be directly oxygenated if the Titan is underwater or her throat is otherwise occupied. Plug ports at shoulders, wrist, spine, and waist can accommodate larger and more specialized equipment. Weapon systems, industrial-strength Sybians, construction gear, and synthetic tentacles, are all able to be plugged in and controlled as naturally as if the Titan’s nervous system were organically connected to them. Cutting-edge plugsuits need constant maintenance and calibration, as minor drift and wear on their components lead to drops in efficiency that can spell disaster.

Every aspect of the suit’s function is under the direct control of the team and the Titan herself, precision-managed for combat efficiency, athletic performance, or personal pleasure. A plug suit can split at any point to expose the flesh beneath, but later models with high affinity don’t need this function: a Titan in a perfectly customized plug suit will find it becoming a part of her body, becoming her skin. Shiny, smooth, cool, colorful, with their every curve perfectly outlined, their every hole accessible at will, yielding when they want and impenetrable when they need, more sensitive than their bare skin, but with a dial that lets you turn sensitivity up and down. It looks like clothing so you can wear it in public, but you’re actually showing off your truly naked body, a nakedness you made. These Titans are the truest cyborgs: sometimes, when they extend an umbilical to unbirth a human, the cord comes out as a resilient link hose matching their plug suit color, attaching to the human navel like a vacuum and immediately beginning the blood mingling -- operating at peak efficiency when the human wears a plug suit of their own to facilitate the process.

Indeed, in the past, the unbirthing process was pretty cramped. Humans are smaller than Titans but not THAT much smaller. Regular humanoid sized plug suits now are available, though due to economies of magical scale they aren’t nearly as effective for them as for Titans. Their main purpose for support crews or Titan-lovers is to facilitate unbirth, activating the condenser module that renders the human smaller, weaker, and able to fit more easily. Of course, they are also worn by people who like Titans for the same fetish reasons Titans love them, and they’re good assistance devices for certain respiratory and cardiac conditions.

Unbirthed humanoids are perfect companions to Titans. A crew member who has been recently unbirthed by her Titan has a level of synergy and synchronization that is utterly supernatural, responding to needs the moment they arise, perfectly covering every deficit in her awareness, empathically linked and sharing their deep emotions. Of course, the connection needs to be refreshed every now and again to maintain perfect sync. While inside the Titan’s womb, the passenger is weakened, has reduced ability to know what’s going on, but has a synchronization that is beyond perfect, able to respond to the Titan’s needs before they even know of them and allowing her to be perfectly “in the zone” -- this is a very specialized and risky technique, as the Titan needs to re-learn all her muscle memory to accommodate a pregnant belly, but some combat Titans will go into battle carrying their operators inside their bodies.

And a human can stay inside a Titan’s womb for longer than necessary, experiencing a dreamy reflection of what the Titan experiences, knowing her as deeply as it is possible to know someone. Mixed-size couples often involve carrying the smaller partner in the womb for longer and longer periods. Not all of them, though. Some of them just ain’t into that and that’s okay. There’s plenty of crews who don’t unbirth anyone.

The next advancement of plug suits is said to be the bio-suit, an organism engineered from the Titan’s own milk and seed to cover her perfectly as a symbiote, diverting energy anywhere it’s needed, adapting to anything without a designated plug, keeping her in a constant state of sexual stimulation with its ever-shifting array of internal tongues and tendrils. They’re very rare and hush-hush for now, they are extremely expensive, but there are a few Titans out there who have one and may know how to make your own.

* * *

_Simple competition. Two Titans sit side by side, jerking each other off for an audience. Cum the most while lasting the longest._

_“She’s losing it,” Simone says into the headset. “Bites her lip when you jiggle her breast. Get a finger in there.” She cranks down a dial._

_Her Titan complies, swapping her jerk-off hand to reach around and slide one plugsuited fingertip into the yielding flesh of her opponent’s nipple. She bites her lip and moans._

_“Keep it up,” Simone says. “I have a two-liter bottle in my cunt right now, and it only comes out when you win.”_

* * *

_“Pick me up. I wanna see.”_

_The Titan giggles. “I’m practically laying down. Just stand up at the top of the hill and you’ll see better than I can.”_

_“I don’t wanna see better,” says her friend. “I wanna see what you see.”_

_She leans back, her friend clambers onto her shoulder, holding onto her neck to avoid slipping off. The Titan rests on her grass-stained elbows, looking out over the forests._

_“It’s beautiful…” her friend remarks._

_Her friend nuzzles into the side of her head._

_“...If you say ‘not as beautiful as you’ I am going to fling you.”_

* * *

_“Ahhhhhhh…” She may be more of a mascot than a Goddess, but it’s still exhausting work. Suit off, she slips into the steaming bath._

_Two of her attendants get to work, spraying the pressurized shampoo and massaging it into her scalp._

_Her ‘High Priestess’, cleansed and naked and beautiful, takes a ginger step onto her stomach. The size of a child to her Titan, she has to be careful not to slip off. Once she is steady, she takes a breast in each hand, gently rubbing, teasing._

_The Titan coos. Her head slips halfway into the water. She blows bubbles._

**Titan Characters**

Monzani humans have French or Italian names and surnames, as appropriate to what side of the region they are on (Altia is obviously Italy, Bayeaux is obviously France). Titans have the same style of given name, but their surnames are hyphenated honorifics and appellations about their strength, beauty, honor, prowess, etc.

Titans who go out on adventures are competitors. If they weren’t, they’d stay home. They want to prove themselves to be the best. No matter what path in life you took, around age 5 to 7 you almost certainly dreamed of being a Titansport competitor. But you probably don’t want to particularly prove yourself better than others to humiliate them; you know that your victory will be a team effort, and it’s about your own worth rather than your relative position. You’re always on the lookout for new techniques to learn and new upgrades to employ. You’re not an Orc, though you get them: for you competition is not a moral duty and source of truth, it’s sheer joy. You don’t compete because you must, you compete because you love to. You relish your freedom and physicality.

There’s plenty of reasons for a Titan to go out on fun adventures: You might be a successful competitor out on holiday with her winnings, an up-and-comer out for sponsors, a scout for new Grand Prix sites, a prospective competitor or warrior out to gather real-world experience, or a resignee out to show she still has the skills… and of course you want to fuck a bunch of people smaller than you. You have one obvious role in a group, that of the one who Solves physical Problems, but you also could be a celebrity “face” and financier or a technical expert. If you don’t have a dedicated support crew, you would have taught your friends how to perform most of the useful support roles for you. Vampires -- assuming you’re in on their secret -- actually make really good pit crew, because a hypnotic service top and a powerful independent girl who needs to submit to another’s guidance and skill to function at full efficiency are a match made in heaven. Plus, you just have a whole shit ton of blood for them to drink, if you’re out in the wilderness you’re basically a giant Thermos. (Otdikh actually does operate a Titansport team, but only the Titan herself is hypnotized; she thinks Titans are uniquely immune to mind control and isn’t saying anything. Her crew thinks they tread a dangerous line in working for an undead master, but that it’s also kind of cool.)

Whatever kind of augmentation you have, to run around the world with a group of adventuring pals requires you to have a commercial “condenser module”, something that can shrink you to 3 meters so you can go inside buildings meant for smaller races, albeit uncomfortably. You’re much weaker in this form, though you are still just as durable, and you need to carefully ration the internal mana you use for physical enhancement. You’re a valuable team member, but you can’t solo everything -- you’re still part of a team. When you’re outside, though, you can cast off the limiters and really fucking cut loose, going absolutely ham on anything that gets in your way, looking great and feeling great while you do it. 

As an adventurous Titan, you are always ready to fuckin’ _go_ , for whatever definition of “fuckin’ _go_ ” is applicable. Every breath you can take easily, every step you can happily run, is a gift from the universe, and you aren’t going to waste it.


	7. Wrapping Up The Family Tree: Dark Elves Of Nahui-Citli

_(Content warning: incest, romanticized depictions thereof, breeding and birthing, bondage, consensual ritualistic slavery, ara ara, nursing, domination, countersignaling, ara ara intensifies, telenovelas)_

Ancient historical accounts of the Elves, what little can be assembled, speak of the Dark Elves’ lands beneath the continent of Etrangia -- the sprawling underground empire of Nahui-Citli, not a unified government but unified by the name of the doom that would consume the world -- as a wicked subterranean empire of blood and betrayal, where the sun had been murdered, malice lurked behind every false smile and poison in every offered drink. The Dark Elves, surprisingly, will cop to this: in their ancient times, the Traitorous Age, they were pretty terrible, and though they had wisdom and resources beyond most other species, they wasted it all on politicking and betrayal. Ruining each other, ruining everyone on the continent, just not being nice people. Dark Elf sociologists will point to how the _tonalpohualli_ they now align their society around was really the only way their society could have kept going without murdering itself into oblivion. They point to this theory more strenuously when everyone else objects to how… odd the _tonalpohualli_ is.

Almost all Dark Elves are futanari: female-bodied, female-minded, with a fully functioning set of male and female genitals. Due to their extended lifespans (a Dark Elf can live to be 2000 if she plays her cards right), the gestation periods of their children are proportionately longer: 52 years. The _tonalpohualli_ , or “Sacred Count”, is the ritual period encompassing this time. It begins when Dark Elf children, upon reaching the age of sexual maturity, are impregnated by their mothers, usually while the both of them speak partially-improvised litanies about how the mother was taken by her mother to create the daughter, and how the child created in the daughter will one day be taken by her. Then, the daughter’s childhood officially ends, and her term as her mother’s pregnant sex slave begins. She wears a leash and collar, to symbolize ownership, and a bondage harness, to symbolize her mother’s constant embrace. Slavery to her mother accomplishes two things: a means for her mother to keep her safe and take responsibility for her during the long period where pregnancy makes her more vulnerable, and a means for her mother to fully, intensively train her in adulthood and womanhood, including the slavery she will place her own daughter in.

The Dark Elves say this is a perfectly reasonable process given the vulnerability of pregnant people, the need to provide large familial bonds in society to guard against damaging internal betrayal and warfare, and the fact that Elves don’t suffer a damaged gene pool from incest. Further, this endless cycle is a beautiful renewal that unites them all in experience. Everyone else says “You’re fucking weird, and every love song any of you has ever written is incredibly creepy.”

**Oh My, Do You Not Know How Our Bodies Work?**

Dark Elves are descended from the original erased “Grey Elves”, and have typical elven features: tall, lithe, graceful, and long pointy ears. Unlike their cousins, Dark Elves possess dark grey to violet and indigo hued skin, and platinum-white hair. Dark Elves have no innate magic and therefore have the most affinity for intentional magic, as well as a long lifespan in which to perfect the art.

Dark Elves live in deep underground caverns, hewn from the living rock and lit by dim bioluminescent bulbs. They can see in total darkness, though in black and white, and sunlight is uncomfortable and squinty without sunglasses. Of course there are several Dark Elf designer brands of sunglasses, fashioned to give off an air of quiet but unquestionable dominance AND not remind people that you can’t handle their basic source of light.

As Dark Elf gestation periods are much longer, so too are childhoods. They progress through infancy and… toddlerdom? Toddlercy? Whatever the word for being a toddler is? Anyway that is as fast as anyone else, but gradually their aging slows down. They aren’t dumb nor uninquisitive, and learn as well as anyone. They could probably join a wider society while they still looked like children, they know enough, but wouldn’t be comfortable: they learn intensively as well as extensively, and want to learn the same experiences again and again to master subtle differences in how things work and how they don’t, seeing each one with the same fresh-faced wonder. Even after graduating childhood, aging still slows. Dark Elves remain youthful-looking for quite a long time, and even when they age beyond that, they age very gracefully. Their faces may become creased and distinguished with experience and authority but they never sag or wrinkle. 

Also, once they have matured and are no longer children, Dark Elves have some bomb-ass titties. Serious gazongas. About the lowest they get is a C-cup, and that’s not that common. I’m talking absolutely severe dohoonkabhankoloos. 

As stated above, Dark Elf genetics don’t degrade from incest, and almost all Dark Elves are futanari. Purely female children are extremely rare and various superstitions hold them to be omens of ruin or harbingers of great destiny. A couple girls _swear_ their sistercousin’s hairdresser’s wifemother saw a purely male Dark Elf.

**Why Of Course I’d Love To Tell You About Our Sacred Count, Dear**

The _tonalpohualli_ is the starting point of every Dark Elf’s life and maturity, and the traditions for such passed down from mother to daughter. It’s like how other races regard their entire time in school, except it’s 24/7, and it’s a greater percentage of their lifespan, and it’s intimately tied to their most romantic relationships, so it’s hard to overstate how important it is.  
At the first stage, the Dark Elf is a child. She learns the basics of life, and most importantly, what it is to be loved. She has freedom to explore the world and gentle guidance to keep her safe in it. She learns of the world again and again, of subtle differences in causes and how they can create such wildly different effects, how she can change things and make things happen using overt or subtle effort. Like a spunky little adventurer, she explores the local caves for cool crystals and spiders. And always, Mommy is there to help her, teach her, comfort her, kiss her boo-boos, or play along in her make-believe. Her mother is her guide and best friend, and as she matures, so does her mother’s love for her. Becoming more complex and beautiful as it goes from the single tone of familial love to the harmonic chord of familial love and lust.

This stage passes to the next when the Dark Elf daughter comes of age, a time that only her mother can determine should occur. The child’s first romantic and sexual experience is with her mother, and the act has a great deal of ceremonial reverence. The mother knows the daughter better and more deeply than anyone, and the litanies and invocations they speak as the mother claims the daughter and plants her seed are not traditional, they are crafted around the specifics of their relationship and history.

At the second stage, the Dark Elf is a slave. As her own child grows in her, she learns her sexuality, how to pleasure others, what it is to serve. Her mother now has her on a leash, and the “free range” freedom she had as a child is greatly restricted. Now, she has boundaries and orders, and a purpose to her life: the pleasure of her Mother-Mistress. Obedience and values are instilled into her, never by lecture or edict, but by rewards or disapproval. She returns to nursing from her mother’s breast as an erotic act and gesture of submission. Her harness may change in accordance with her growth and Mother’s wishes, often to put her into or take her out of arm bindings, but she only takes it off to bathe. As boundaries are drawn around her, she defines which lines are truly dictated by herself. She will begin to test these boundaries as she asserts herself against them, subtly working within the rules to undermine them and gain power, thus gaining her Mistress’s respect as an equal. They will start to exchange verbal barbs and veiled threats as their relationship matures, but that’s a good thing, that’s detailed in a bit. Of course there’s often a period of about 5-7 years where the rebellion is not nearly so subtle or poetic and there’s a bunch of screaming matches and “Uuuuugh, Mom, you don’t UNDERSTAND!”. Everyone has an unspoken agreement to ignore this and just remember all the poetic subtlety, but at least the make-up sex is usually good.

And for a long time, it was tradition to craft a unique bondage harness for your daughter to wear, until it actually became feasible to mass-produce modular, adjustable harnesses. Now, nobody gets a handmade harness unless they can splurge on hiring master artisans for something really fancy and unique, and a lot of passive-aggressive one-upping of the neighbors consists of buying fancy name-brand designer harnesses for your daughter-slave to show her off.

This stage passes to the next when the Dark Elf gives birth to her own daughter, rising as an equal to her mother. Without medical intervention, a Dark Elf can easily remain in labor for weeks, and the implications of that are exactly what you want them to be. Labor is painful, of course, it is for most anyone. And it’s pleasurable of course, just like it is for a great many in Eilverra. But it’s not just intensely painful and not just intensely pleasurable, it’s intensely emotionally satisfying, the physical and sensory confirmation of how much she has grown. A daughter’s period of labor is usually a sort of “last hurrah” for the mother, signalling the end of her daughter’s slavery, so there’s a lot of debauchery aimed at pleasing Mommy’s every desire with her daughter’s gravid, willing, contraction-wracked body. Giving birth is done at home, intimately, as an erotic act. If the mother can’t or prefers not to have sex during the birth, she usually at least masurbates to it, making frequent eye contact with her daughter. Traditionally, the mother removes the bondage harness at the same time as the umbilical cord is cut, for her daughter is a slave no longer.

At the third stage, the Dark Elf is now a mother. She will learn what it is to create, to nurture. She nurses her daughter from her breast as her mother did to her, helping her grow strong and healthy. She rediscovers the freedom and wonder of the world she once experienced through her child’s eyes, and gently guides her daughter through it. She may remember the spot where she looked for a hare, the mythical creature that grants little Dark Elves their wishes. Where her Mommy said she once found it. What did she wish for? A perfect, wonderful daughter of course. Just like her daughter did. Her heart will swell first with pride, then with so many loves, for her beautiful and beloved child. See her daughter’s guileless smile and laughter and understand that’s what she must protect and nurture.

And this stage passes to the next when she decides it is time. The Dark Elf will lay her daughter down in her bed, and shower her with kisses, and become intoxicated with the smell of her hair, and caress away what little worry may remain because her daughter is safe in the embrace of Mommy, and whisper how beautiful her daughter is, and whisper to her all she knows of her for she knows more perfectly than anyone else could, and both will know how beautiful the cycle that entwines them is. And she will sire a child in her own child, and whether they spend the next day or so blowing load after load into her daughter’s jizz-drooling snatch to make sure it took or gently holding and caressing each other, needing nothing more than to see each other’s faces… their relationship has changed forever.

At this fourth stage, the Dark Elf is a mistress. She now needs to control and shape her own daughter as she once was shaped. Her daughter exists now for her pleasure, and at this point, what she realizes is that her greatest pleasure is to see her daughter grow into a smart, capable, independent person (though incest blowjobs on demand certainly doesn’t hurt). She sets edicts and boundaries, overt at first, but then smaller and more subtle -- realizing that Dark Elves do not prefer subtlety in this because they find overt power distasteful, but because the purpose of these boundaries is to serve not as walls to direct her daughter’s path of growth, but guardrails. Her daughter’s bindings must feel like her Mother’s embrace wherever she goes, and so wherever she goes must be where Mother embraces her. She remembers what rules she embraced and what she struggled against when she was a slave, and she begins to realize how much she was learning from the things she paid no mind to. Her daughter’s arms will be laced tight behind her to keep her dependent on Mother, but only as she works out for herself how dependent on the help of others she wishes to be, how far to go to do things on her own. And then also there will be some screaming matches, probably, and she will wire her own mother and say “On the Venom, how did you ever put up with me?” but she will know the answer. Love.

And this stage ends with her daughter’s labor, her body preparing to give birth. Mother must take all the pleasure she can from her daughter’s gravid, gasping, agonizingly ecstatic form. Not simply for her own benefit, though again that doesn’t hurt, but to give her a last burst of love and support and joy she will need as she becomes a mother herself. 

With the consent of both parties, of course, a freed-child may volunteer to bear her mother another child and re-enter slavery, which may continue indefinitely from there. Reactions to this are mixed overall, as while mothers do enjoy having pregnant sex slaves, sometimes it is a statement of “Mother, your love for me is so perfect I have no need to be independent, I wish to be in your tight embrace forever”, and sometimes it is “Mother, I totally cannot get my life together, so putting another baby in me lets me crash on your couch for at least another 52 years before I have to get a job.” 

But that’s uncommon. Almost always, at this point, the Sacred Count is complete. She is now a fully-fledged Dark Elf, ready to face the world and live her life as herself, the person Mommy helped to shape, the person who helped to shape her beloved child. Part of an unbroken, beautiful cycle.

Someone who will just repeat the phrase “Unbroken. Beautiful. Cycle.” with slightly firmer emphasis when someone from another race starts talking about all the bad things they think should come with incest.

**Oh You Needn’t Feel Any Danger, We’re Simply Showing How Much We Like You**

Now before we get to the next phase, there’s something we need to cover. Dark Elves consider themselves to have a polite, lightly formal, well-mannered society, where people show respect but hindering levels of formality are only reserved for high-level Matriarch court games. Like many other things affected by their Sacred Count or their history of evil shadow games, this is pretty weird to outsiders.

“Polite” to a Dark Elf is also “menacing”. Though they disdain overt displays of power or overt threats, subtle barbs about someone’s vulnerability or the harm that may or may not befall them -- but would be SUCH a tragedy if it were to happen of course, many sympathies for such misfortune -- are common courtesy. This is an artifact of the Traitorous Age, or more specifically that confusing time when everyone had agreed to stop being such traitorous backstabbing assholes but didn’t know what to be instead. To acknowledge someone is a threat you need to be aware of dealing with is to show them respect as a capable and intelligent individual. To veil that threat is to respect their social graces and ability to pick up hints.

Exchanging verbal barbs and subtly menacing word games isn’t just part of how Dark Elves show politeness, it isn’t just how they flirt, it’s a stimulating and fun pastime. The most common form of this is The Questions, a game you will usually find yourself playing whenever you answer a question with another question (the way that when you speak in unison with some other people you have to shout “Jinx!” before they do lest you owe them a drink). Playing The Questions is informal and simple: every thing you say to the other person must be a question and not a declarative statement. Everything you say must be related to the conversation and serve as a response to the other’s last question. No repeating yourself. No waiting more than a few seconds to respond. Asking questions that seem to subtly insult or undermine the other is not required but is encouraged, to give them something to play with. Loser buys the winner a drink.

So threatening and insulting others subtly is the basic level of politeness expected from you. Dark Elves don’t fault other races for being impolite in this way, because they are used to admitting their traditions are strange, and because it just shows that the other peoples need some maternal guidance to flourish. Like in other heavily polite societies, politeness follows kind of a weird bell curve. A total lack of subtle threats means “I am completely unconcerned with you harming me”, which is either a statement of “we are so close I know you will not betray me” or “you are so far beneath me I ain’t even gonna bother.” It’s how you address children, and this is no sign of disrespect, it’s just appropriate… for children.

There’s no hard and fast rules, just general trends outside of highly formal settings. People spend more time with other people’s children as they are taken out and socialized, and being politely threatening obviously isn’t called for there. Most day-to-day talk is just sort of vaguely threatening and predatory in a way that outsiders have a hard time putting a finger on. As things become more formal and respectful, it becomes more of a verbal sparring match, a dance of barbs and venom. But between equals, it’s also kind of more playful, flirtatious. Being vaguely threatening to someone is how you show polite deference, but ALSO, how you flirt, but ALSO, how you have a fun little word game with them. Not threatening someone at all is how you show disrespect OR how you show intimacy for your loved ones OR how you show affection toward a child OR how you show familiarity with family members which is going to be nearly everyone you interact with on a daily basis. You can kind of justify anything at this point, there’s no written rulebook. Just, try to be the vaguest bit threatening, and act like you’re confident in everything you’re doing, don’t ever actually say “I am going to kick your ass”, and outside of an interaction with a clear superior it won’t be a faux pas.

Interactions with one’s superiors are bizarrely asymmetrical: a Matriarch’s courtiers will address her like they have to get out a secret coded message to communicate that the Matriarch is a ravenous wolverine who could decapitate them at any moment for any slight, and the Matriarch addresses them with “‘Sup, fam?” It’s usually _embarrassingly_ easy to tell when two Dark Elves have the hots for each other, because they get more distant and vaguely menacing toward each other, and maybe they try to play it off as “oh no she’s a rival I need to be careful around her is all I’m not flirting” and nobody ever buys it.

**Oh, Don’t Worry About Us Darling, Every Life Has A Second Act**

Passing the four stations in the Sacred Count, from child, to slave, to mother, to Mistress, marks a Dark Elf’s mastery and comprehension of her roles in life and place in the world, even though it is (comparatively) early in her lifespan, and she is (probably) free to go about the life she wishes.

Contra F. Scott Fitzgerald, this means that every Dark Elf life has a second act, and that is where most of their life happens, though they are shaped by and will never forget their participating in the Sacred Count. It isn’t uncommon for Dark Elves after this point to feel no need for romance, looking back fondly on their mother and their daughter as sexual and romantic partners and staying in touch from time to time but not pursuing partnership further. Most others, after some time alone to find themselves, will begin a courtship and romance with another Dark Elf. Sexual attraction to those you don’t share a bloodline is considered an “outcest” kink, though for most Dark Elves that just makes things more appealingly naughty, whether their partner is of their race or not. There have been, like, five cases in recorded history of twin sisters who did NOT fall madly in love with each other and marry the moment their slavery ended.

Lacking the male and female genders found in many other races, Dark Elf sexuality isn’t based on gender. Since they love big titties, almost all Dark Elves are attracted to feminine bodies; Dark Elves attracted to men are rarer but have a much more refined, connoisseur’s taste. Their version of sexuality is about dominance and submission. Some Dark Elves remember their slavery so fondly, especially that bit at the end with the labor-wracked marathon of sex, and seek to be a good little girl for another partner. And some of them only want to experience dominance again, the satisfaction of cultivating a new partner, watching them grow. Most Dark Elves, though, are switches who are usually dominant but will submit to the right person. Dark Elf dating and courtship is about proving who is the “right person” to dom who. Who can be a good Mommy to whom.

The urge to nurture and mother is _strong_ in Dark Elves, and because their prototype for relationships is incest, they don’t pay much heed to the concept of defining boundaries between different types of relationship. There’s not a line between family and lover, friend and family, or mentor and Mommy. Dark Elves see someone who needs help, someone they like, someone who could really use the guidance of their superior experience and wisdom, and they… they love to help out in any way they can. Help them grow and mature. Meet all their needs as only a Mother can. Ara ara. It’s rare for any Dark Elf relationship, no matter what race it’s with, to not follow the mother/child pattern. Not impossible, not unheard of, just rare

If someone is clearly the metaphorical child that a Dark Elf could help by being their Mommy, that’s great, that’s excellent. They size up their potential partners with a predatory “oh my, whatever do we have here” air, calmly taking apart their strengths and weaknesses, so they know what their beloved daughter-like-lover should work on, before taking the reins. If neither clearly needs or wants to be the daughter, then their courtship becomes a deadly dance, two knife fighters circling each other and gauging any sign of weakness, except the knives are made of foam pool noodles and they know at some point in this deadly duel they are going to trip and everyone is going to have a good laugh at it. The dating power dance is the one thing the Sacred Count doesn’t prepare you for, so everyone is kind of new, and they’re kind of bad at it. They don’t have practice in being all cagey and dangerously alluring in the rest of their lives, beyond the way they talk. 

Some things are obvious, yeah. You show up at her home unannounced, not demanding sexual service openly, but merely making it clear with your demeanor that Mother Will Not Be Denied. But if she’s actually not at home, you feel like a fucking jackass. Slip a trace of aphrodisiac into her drink, see how it lowers her inhibitions and loosens her tongue, but if that lowered inhibition leads to a lot more drink you’re going to be holding her hair back as she ralphs in the bathroom and thinking “this is not as sexy as I hoped it would be”. Tie a shibari harness around her while she sleeps and when she wakes, tell her you’ll only take it off after she wears it to work under her clothes. But then maybe she undoes the thing without breaking eye contact, and the ropes fall to the floor at her feet, and you’re like “well shit I just got blown up pretty bad”.

It’s not that your relationship becomes officially committed when you decide definitively who is the Mommy and who is the daughter. I mean, if you do, that’s great. But even in a fully fledged marriage, it usually shifts back and forth. You’re in a relationship when you sincerely don’t mind losing and being the daughter sometimes. You still have things to learn and ways to grow, right? There was never any shame in that, and you are good to get past any foolish pride making you feel like you should resist it. But you can be the teacher and Mother too, sometimes.

Nursing one’s partner is an erotic and dominant act, reinforcing who is Mother and who is child. There’s nothing humiliating about it, unless you have some hangups of your own -- but it is notable that the Dark Elf equivalent of the phrase “take the L” is more accurately translated as “suck the nipple”.

**We’ve A Very Welcoming Society, We’d Quite Love To Have Someone As Special As You**

The important thing to stress is nearly all power dynamics and interactions with Dark Elves is that they disdain overt exertion of power, they find it tasteless and insulting to both involved. Veiled threats are fine, you’re treating them like a person, you can make it clear with your tone of voice when your threat is a threat and is not merely polite. But saying “Do this or I’ll have to make things unpleasant for you?” No, that’s how you talk to your daughter, and only when you’re both losing your cool and you haven’t yet learned how to do it the right way! Like, Dark Elves don’t have a military. Even when they were traitorous assholes fucking with everyone around them, they never marched an army. How unsubtle! They merely saw that _tragic_ accidents befell anyone who posed a problem to them or their “foster children”, before that problem ever got close. What a shame. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Many condolences.

No, the way to get what you want is to make clear what you want, and make clear that you are the Mommy and to disobey you need not carry any consequence because it’s simply incomprehensible. The ideal form of authority in the Dark Elf mind is one where the only punishment for failure is the knowledge that Mommy is not mad, but she is disappointed.

Dark Elves have always done very well for themselves as a society, and their economy is mostly based in the service and financial sectors. The relevant part of that is that many Dark Elves are office ladies in pencil skirts and pantyhose, or similar types of service jobs where they can jockey for power against their peers, strive for the favor of their superior. But since everyone is family and it’s mostly for fun, it’s like the flag-football version of courtly power games. The kind where you expose someone’s vulnerability and have them helpless, and you go “Boop! Gotcha!” as you theatrically tap them on the head and then you go back to business.

Speaking of pencil skirts and pantyhose, traditional Dark Elf clothing was made of patent leather and shiny, latex-like material. This wasn’t even a fetish thing -- they are underground, there’s not a lot of plants to make textiles from, and moisture resistance is paramount. But now that they’ve been introduced to clothing from the outside world, and the outside world has started fetishizing their traditional clothing, they fetishize the living daylights out of it too. Dominants and submissives have their own styles of harness and gear, and it’s basically taken the role of underwear for other races. Seeing the black leather support straps of a cupless bra is just as sexy as the low-cut dress exposing the cleavage of those bazooms. Even if your dominatrix leathers cover enough of your body to be worn in public, you can still unbutton your dress shirt and your vest and flash it at someone and you aren’t just flashing your body, you’re showing your dominance.

Almost all of the other Dark Elves one meets in their day to day life are blood relatives, and bloodline is very important to them. Since the main trunk of the family tree is just a family line and is _pretty easy_ to memorize, most know all their relations dozens of degrees removed, who will make up the people around them. However, since primary bloodlines progress primarily through pure matrilineal incest and everything else branches off, they needed some way to mark lineages so that every Dark Elf doesn’t have one of the same thirteen names. So, their full names do include the major bloodline of the Matriarch they descend from, but also a surname, which is _complete_ bullshit. You add a glottal stop and another syllable when you branch from a matrilineal incest line, so by this point, everyone’s surname is some fucking nonsense like “Dor’xan’quop’ibbo’urf’zel’dir’dor’ebb”. It’s an enormous hassle and barely any other race can keep track of it, many Dark Elves themselves can’t recall any but their own, they just use given names and rely on context. 

Unlike most other races who have become more atheist, Dark Elves didn’t gradually abandon their religion as science explained more of the world. The adoption of the Sacred Count came along with the deliberate choice to stop worshipping their gods after collectively acknowledging that their gods were fucking assholes who only ever answered prayers to fuck with people and never helped anyone, so starving them of devotion and worship was the right call. There wasn’t a single person who drove a revolutionary moment of truth for this, it was more like everyone looking around and saying “This… This is crazy, right?” Any current worship of the Old Gods is done furtively, in secret, though profanity still invokes them. The Dark Elf concept of sacredness has nothing to do with a spiritual nature, instead it’s about being harmonious and complete in design. When did the Dark Elves stop worshipping their Old Gods and adopt the _tonalpohualli_? Good question. When the oldest living Dark Elf was herself a newborn, there did not exist a single living Dark Elf who did not grow up under the Sacred Count, so it must have been thousands of years ago. Except everyone else on Etrangia remembers the Dark Elves fucking with them in the name of those Old Gods, like, a couple hundred years ago. They also remember there being seventeen Matriarch Houses, not thirteen. Time Scooch.

Almost all Dark Elves consider themselves monogamous, and almost none of them are. They value exclusivity in their emotional intimacy more than exclusivity in a sexual relationship, but like someone who is on a diet where they only eat fries off of YOUR plate, they have dozens of reasons and exceptions why sex and intimacy with another “don’t count”. Of course, everyone is still hot for their mothers and daughters, that’s not cheating to go back with them! You should go back to Mother on every Mother’s Day to show her how much you appreciate her. (This is why they have five Mother’s Days, so the whole thing doesn’t become an unnavigable clusterfuck where everyone wants to go see her mother, who wants to see HER mother, who wants to see HER mother, etc.) And your friends are your family are your students are your lovers, so of course you need to show them affection and pleasure. And when you see someone promising, you need to let them know what a good Mommy can offer them. And when someone else teaches you something and makes you the daughter in some little way, what, are you NOT going to nurse from her while she jerks you off? Come on. Dark Elves know the score on these things. They wouldn’t _cheat_ on anyone.

Dark Elves love to play games. Most of them started as metaphors or training for deadly court games in the Traitorous Age, but now they just make ‘em for fun. Like Bunnies created and love roulette, the iconic Dark Elf game is billiards: a game where you want to get those balls in the holes, but the only ball you may touch is the one you never want to fall, and must affect your actual targets only indirectly. Perfect for a people who valorize subtle power. Also, chalking a pool cue gives you something to do with your hands if you feel awkward about that.

**Oh, You Needn’t Worry Your Pretty Little Head About These Schemes**

There are some lingering vestiges of the dark and murderous days of the Dark Elves’ ancient past, the Traitorous Age. They season their foods with microdoses of poison, for example. But nowhere are they more obvious than in the upper echelons of society, where the _cihuachpilli_ (”noble great-grandmothers”, Matriarchs) of each of the 13 Houses scheme their ancient schemes, maneuvering for power and dominance. Beneath them, their daughter-courtiers plot and vie against one another for the Matriarch’s favor, or to depose and replace the Matriarch. While it isn’t as bad as in the Traitorous Age – people very rarely die now, since they ARE all family, and the Matriarchs themselves are experienced enough to know open conflict with other Matriarchs is a bad idea – navigating the Dark Elven halls of power is still a dangerous game at best, with a thousand secret alliances woven into an already dense web of familial connections. All political power and decisions happen within the Matriarchs’ courts and inter-court negotiations, with the matriarchs themselves concerned for the well-being of their subjects, as their subjects are literally their descendants. High-class and powerful Dark Elves have a style best described as “as ornate as possible while made of as little material as possible”, and many of them are perpetually pregnant as a display of their power and security that they don’t NEED to worry about being weakened by pregnancy. Competing to see who will get to sire a Matriarch’s next child is a regular cause for office-politicking and alliance-mongering.

This countersignalling of vulnerability-as-strength is even more dangerous than most people know. Elves age very gracefully, their bodies don’t get weaker. But what older Elves try and keep secret is this: A Dark Elf, like all Elves, becomes more fragile as she ages, not in terms of her health but in her fundamental metaphysical being. Despite appearing to be in perfect vigor, she becomes injured more easily, and the injuries last longer. Negative thoughts from others begin to cause slight harms. The delicate, submissive caress of their servants is the only way to touch them and not leave bruises. If they were to walk outside in a rainstorm, it would be like being shot with a machine gun. Dark Elves don’t technically die of old age, but when they die of “natural causes”, it’s because the very possibility of harm coming to them flat-out kills them. To live a very, very long time, a Dark Elf would be smart to stay hidden and unknown, safe from harmful thoughts of others, locked away from potential dangers. Instead of ever doing that, they are engaged in a game of chicken with the other matriarchs. “Yeah, I’m walking up to you in nothing but a thong when I know you could flick me and break my arm, whatcha gonna do about it, _bitch_?”

Dark Elves are technically anarcho-syndicalists, though they aren’t mimeographing manifestos or anything. They don’t have a government, just the 13 Houses and their Matriarchs, and the agreements they enter into with each other. The majority of Dark Elven population has nothing to do with their leadership and are happier for it; indeed, they never understood the appeal of democracy because that would just mean everyone has to keep track of a huge web of alliances for every vote and that would be juuuuust exhausting. Us girls down here, we don’t need to mess with all that. We just play around with each other, and we look out for each other, because we’re all family. Oh, you’re descended from another Matriarch, or you’re not a Dark Elf at all? Ehhhh... Close enough, you count as adopted.

**Our Dear, Beloved Friends The Bunnies**

Dark Elves have a reputation as shadowy evil manipulators, and they actually ARE shadowy manipulators and you know there could be a few evil ones sprinkled in. Most other races and cultures find the life cycle their society is built around incredibly distasteful. Most other peoples don’t really like Dark Elves, and even though Dark Elves have lots of literal and metaphorical investments going on in the surface world that get them entangled in other races’ affairs, it’s not something people really like to talk about. They have business partners, alliances of expediency, alliances backed by veiled threats, but few true _allies_.

The major exception, though, is Bunnies. Ever since their two peoples came in contact, Dark Elves and Bunnies have been unlikely but incredibly steadfast allies; Bunnies off to make a new warren are usually invited to make it close to an existing Dark Elf city, accept the Dark Elves’ assistance, and to come visit often for employment, breeding, or just hanging out.

Bunnies work great with Dark Elves: having no concept of lineage they have no concept of incest taboo. Their incredible social intelligence allows them to keep track of lots of people, reading complicated webs of alliances with greater ease than most Dark Elves themselves. They can remember everybody’s absurd apostrophe-ridden surnames. They’re down for whatever. They also appreciate the beauty of a pregnant body, and being bunny-bred takes so much less time than normal pregnancy a Dark Elf views it the way you’d see a relaxing spa outing. They may be ditzy and bubbly, but adult Dark Elves are good at guiding the less mature, aren’t they? Yes, their short lives are sad, but so is the short life of every mortal race, and Bunnies are much more at peace with it because they know for a fact that once they experience that final fade-out they will go to be with Cyndi, to chill out in Her divine presence. 

Dark Elves are as devoted to their Bunnies as they are to their children, but they recognize Bunnies have different needs than they. So Dark Elves will bend over backwards to accommodate their Bunnies’ needs. Sufficiently wealthy Dark Elves employ Bunnies as full-time assistants, and less wealthy ones like to befriend Bunnies and keep in touch. Even employing them, a relationship ostensibly about meeting the Dark Elf’s needs, is about setting those little inconspicuous guardrails to guide the Bunny for her benefit, making sure she is growing, and making sure she is having a good time. 

A Dark Elf who marries a Bunny will spend their entire marriage utterly devoted to her and her desires, whatever they may be. If she wants to be a happy and well-cared for pet, then a pet she will be. But if she wants to be a bubbly bimbo-dom, then a pet she will have. Does she think polite threats are creepy? Then she will never deal with them. Does she like the thought of exchanging little verbal jabs and threats? Then their tongues will spar in more than one metaphorical way. Does she want to exchange little verbal jabs and threats but she’s just not very good at it because she doesn’t have the background experience, which is quite understandable and not at all a slight against her? Then her Dark Elf wife may show up one day with pink hair and a much ditzier attitude, bimbofying herself so they can both feel satisfied with “Yuh-huh!” “Nuh-uh!”

A Bunny’s life is short and precious and worth enriching. It doesn’t take very long, relatively, for a Dark Elf to do that. In the Bunny’s guileless smile and unbridled enthusiasm they see everything they wish to protect.

Dark Elves believe their gods are as real as Cyndi, but they like Cyndi way better. Religious Dark Elves don’t exactly worship Cyndi but they do think She’s pretty cool and regard Her with a “You go girl” vibe; maybe they even put out decorations for major Bunny holidays, or place roulette wheels and ceremonial shrines in the local bars and salons. Cyndi reciprocates the feeling of respect at healthy distance, as She revealed in a divine message:

**_Thanks for looking out for my girls! Y'all are weird but you're cool too :-p._ **

**_I'll see if I can maybe wing a miracle your way every now and then!_ **

**_XOXOXO, Cyndi_ **

**Don’t Listen To The Tales Sweetheart, You’ll Find Us Very Warm Once You Get To Know Us**

Favoring subtle power without crass overt displays, Dark Elves like to invest in many activities both subterranean and surface-world. You don’t need to THREATEN someone into doing what you want when they know you write the paychecks, and Dark Elves have access to lots of precious metals and mana veins other races can’t easily obtain. Dark Elves are known to mortal races as very patient in their dealings, Dark Elves regard mortals as investments that take a refreshingly short amount of time to mature, and mid-level Matriarch’s aides always keep an ear to the ground for promising new prospects who would be very useful to have in the Matriarch’s debt, by one means or another. This is often seen as dark, shadowy manipulation, but Dark Elves see it differently: they really like to help and foster those with potential, those who could be great, those who need the gentle and wise guidance of Mommy. Most of the people they see, the potential they see, don’t need manipulation! They just need encouragement, support, perhaps a bit of subtle guidance. And lots of love.

Yet, confusingly, Dark Elves are often found as maids or servants in wealthy households of other races. It’s a status play, a display of dominance. The leaders of those estates think they are showing off how powerful they are “Oh, I have taken one of the famously dominant Dark Elves, and she serves at my whim and shows deference to me, I am so powerful!”

The busty Dark Elf maids in question, meanwhile, are thinking “I have the keys to everything you own and everyone who works for you reports to me when they have something you shouldn’t know about. I wear your maid’s apron and bow my head when you enter a room so you won’t notice I am actually running your life. And also because let’s face it it’s a sexy apron and you can’t quite tell if this black bit revealed under the shifting frills is part of the apron or my dom leathers underneath.” Subtle power is the only true form of power, after all. There are often many more promising younglings in the servants of a house than among its lazy and dull masters, ones who look up to the more experienced with a maternal awe.

As a whole, as a people, Dark Elves are not very well liked. Like vampires, they have a bad reputation; unlike vampires, they aren’t trying to maintain it. But as individual people? It’s further proof of Cyndi’s divine wisdom that Dark Elves are indeed weird, but they’re cool too. They’re affectionate and supportive. Playful and clever, quick-witted, with good senses of humor and the knowledge of when to be humble, when to drop the politeness and just be real folks with each other. They understand that their ways are weird to the rest of the world, so they try very hard to be empathetic to the weirdness and needs of others. They can always be counted on to be the Mom Friend. Yes, they habitually step over boundaries between one type of relationship and another, but they’ll back off if you ask, and maybe you don’t want to ask! Doesn’t everyone, in every race, from time to time feel the need to be pampered by Mommy?  
However, there is one thing they are loved for by the wider world, one notable effect of their high-society dealings on the rest of the population: adapted from the traditional long-form semi-improvisational “extended family dramas”, their telenovelas are _fucking bananas_. Long, dense, intricately woven plots upon plots upon plots with casts of hundreds, made to be even more overblown and overwrought than the reality of high-society politicking they are derived from. They are meant to use this larger than life setup as an easily understood canvas upon which the subtle maneuvering can be seen taking place, but they’re so utterly gonzo they’re like mana-infused cocaine for melodrama aficionados. Currently, the political and economic power of matriarch Cihuaztli Zer’dfor can be traced entirely to her decision to subtitle the wildly popular telenovela _Within the Spider’s Web_ and license it for distribution abroad, even though international critics agree the show’s really gone downhill since Izel had a heretofore-unmentioned identical twin who was replacing her in several key scenes as a plot to ruin her life for spurning her advances. The real critical darling is _A Stalactite Looms Downward_ , which sounds far more poetic in its native language.

* * *

_“Nngh… I love you, Mommy,” the daughter whispers, words hard to form in between deep, slobbery kisses._

_“I love you so much, Xeral,” Mommy coos back at her, words caressing her ears as gentle hands caress her child’s hips. “You are the most beautiful girl in the world.”_

_Xeral’s hands bunch up the blankets. She bites her lip. “Please… Mommy, I need it…”_

_“Ssh, ssh,” Mommy soothes. Her own cockhead glides against the eager virgin nethers of her child. “I’m going to give you my baby, darling. Our beautiful baby.”_

_“I need it…” Xeral moans. “Make me a mommy, Mommy…”_

* * *

_“Oh my. What have we here?” The woman’s silver hair glistens in the moonlight; she nibbles the tip of her sunglasses. “You look simply lovely. What is a darling creature like you doing out at this time of night?”_

_“What,” the human responds. “You got something better for me to be doing right now?”_

_“I’ve many better things, lovely, but could you even keep up?”_

_“You think I’m the one who’ll need to ‘keep up’ after I suck you off so hard you jizz knee fluid?”_

_“What the…” She trails off. Then smiles. “Hmm. Seems I owe you a drink.”_

* * *

_“I’m so proud of you,” Czacti says. One hand runs through her girlfriend Kethyr’s hair as she nurses the nurturing warmth from Czacti’s breast. The other strokes her erect shaft._

_“Mmm, I know,” Kethyr says with a smile. “I could see you leaking milk into your blouse from the stage. Did you blow your load in your pants?”_

_“Maybe a bit…” Her breath got more husky. “A wonderful performance like that deserves a very special reward. A very special kind of pie.”_

_“Snow fungus and gooseberry?”_

_“...I was going to say ‘cream pie’ but fuck, now I want one too.”_

* * *

_“It’s not fair! Everyone else is going!”_

_“They aren’t carrying MY child! I don’t want you in some, some mosh hole!”_

_“Nnngh, on the venom, Mom, it’s not even that kind of music! Why can’t you just GET IT?”_

_“Enough! I am your Mistress, you are my slave, you will not be attending!”_

_With her daughter’s arms laced together in a sleeve behind her, she can’t gently close the door to her quarters, but she wouldn’t want to anyway. She kicks the door to slam it._

_Ugh. Why couldn’t she just be into rock and roll, like her mom was?_

**Aren’t We Just Some Characters?**

Dark Elf names are Nahuatl / Aztec if you need real world inspiration, but the traditional fantasy naming scheme of “X, Z, C, L, TH, and a vaguely menacing cast” works just as well. For their surnames, just mash out a random string of letters as long as you like, sneeze on your monitor, and put an apostrophe where every droplet landed.

There’s a popular conception that all Dark Elves are imperious, have royal bearing, and expect to be obeyed. This is true more often than not. Submissive Dark Elves can be found on the surface sometimes -- usually seeking a foreign Mommy -- but they naturally draw less attention to themselves. As a dom, or a switch who will sub for the right person, a Dark Elf doesn’t want to be overtly domineering, she wants to be someone who clearly should be submitted to. And usually, she does this by seeming imperious, with a royal bearing, like someone who expects to be obeyed.

But remember this isn’t about making people feel weak and useless. A Dark Elf dom is a mommy-dom. You want to dominate others to pamper and nurture them and see their potential grow. This is a position of responsibility and you know to take it seriously. If you do not have a position of formal authority, you want to be looked to for wisdom and guidance, and you need to make sure that wisdom and guidance is on point. You may well have your slave-daughter with you, and be using the experience to help teach and guide her, as you try and help everyone else learn by seeing your relationship with her. You probably like to think of yourself as a nice person to those who get to know you, and if you aren’t, you at least want to get people aching to earn your approval. 

You don’t need to see everyone as your child, though you can if you want, and wander through the world making constant “ara ara” sounds like Pac-Man. People can be friends and equals, sisters or like the cool cousin who comes over once in a while to hang out or an aunt you look forward to meeting at family events. Incest is part of your prototype for relationships, so you probably want to be very close and familial with everyone you normally interact with. You have a hard time with boundaries between different types of relationships, if people choose to enforce them (they often don’t). But this also means that your friends are your family, you are comfortable and open with them, and they can count on you for anything. 

Maybe you’re not the mommy-dom to everyone you meet. Maybe you aren’t even a Mommy to your closest lover. But on the Venom, you should be the Mom Friend. Make sure everyone is okay and healthy, be aware of their emotional needs. Always pack some snacks. Always have a shoulder open for crying on. Bring sunscreen everywhere and be prepared to slather it on your friends’ naked bodies (and ask them to do the same to you; even though your skin is dark it doesn’t like spending lots of time in the sun without proper precautions). 

It’s up to you how polite/threatening you want to be, but the assumed default is “I get the vague feeling I’m a fly and she’s a spider and I don’t know why.” But remember, it’s fun. A fun sort of menace. You know you’re weird so it’s not very nice to expect everyone to bend all the way over to accommodate your quirks, you just would like them to bend a little so you can meet in the middle. You’re a fun gal, right? Nice to spend time with. At least two of: honest, funny, and playful. One of the top five races in Eilverra for hanging-out purposes.

It is not common, but not unheard of, for Dark Elves to go to the outside world, especially now that travel is safer and easier than ever. Each Martiarch’s House is like a conglomerate with all sorts of divisions and companies within it, all of which are striving for favor and glory and recognition, so there’s plenty of things to keep your pointed ears to the ground for. Matriarchs sponsor and fund many outside activities that may need checking on, any personal relationships you build can be fruitful professional relationships as well, and everyone is interested in new frontiers and lands to explore and stake a claim in. 

But honestly, people like vacations too, and Dark Elves are no exception. And comparatively speaking, a Dark Elf spending years abroad is like a couple weeks to us. Becoming the Team Mom to a diverse crew of knuckleheads with different powers and goals and histories -- you know, like an adventuring party -- may as well be a fantasy camp for certain types of Dark Elf. Sometimes, the journey really is worth more than the destination. 

There’s another, slightly more sinister reason for many Dark Elves to journey to the surface. The “Adventurer’s Society of Nahui'' poses as a travel guild for world explorers to learn about and experience the world, promoting cultural exchange. It sort of is! But mostly, it is a secret society of outcestuous Dark Elves who compete with each other to see who can impregnate the most non-Elven women and spread their seed the widest. Members of this society can bring their daughters along too -- if one’s daughter is impregnating other non-Elven women, then she isn’t really trying to skip ahead in the _tonalpohualli_ , is she? Just make sure you are there to show her how to do it right. And perhaps if your own daughter has become a mother or Mistress in her own right, your newfound friends may like to join in your fun. After you show them what a good time it can be. Your youngers need guidance and encouragement, after all.


	8. Making a Mark: The Succubus Diaspora

_(Content warning: Succubi, corruption, inmon / body marking, soul merging, ritualism, magical girlfriends, corruption except not the sexy kind, existential crises for hellish bioweapons, nerding the fuck out, IN THE FIRST AGE IN THE FIRST BATTLE WHEN THE SHADOWS FIRST LENGTHENED...)_

Succubi, creatures of lust and temptation, of surrendering to carnal pleasure. Even if sex is not a sin itself, they are shapeshifters and schemers, designed to sow discontent and distrust.

Seeded in this world, made for it, made to grow in it. Sent to destabilize it, turn its leaders against one another, against their own people. To lay groundwork for a demonic invasion that would obliterate all Eilverra held dear and reduce the world to a smoldering pit.

What? I’m now receiving a memo… The invasion is not coming, it’s not possible. You won’t be picked up. You have no purpose and no masters. Whoopsie!

**Succubiology**

The Succubi, in their natural forms, are usually humanoids with non-functional bat wings emerging from their shoulders, horns of varying sizes and shapes that emerge from their heads, and a spade-tipped tail that comes from the base of the spine. “Usually” because, as natural shapeshifters, succubi can only know their natural form by putting as little effort as possible into having an appearance, which is actually somewhat hard and something they are reluctant to do to non-succubi. All closely resemble the mortal they were most recently remade as, but never exactly the same. On top of all that, some have humanoid feet, some have digitigrade legs ending in cloven hooves. Some have huge bat wings, some have tiny decorative ones. Some have patterns of chitinous or patent-leathery material over parts of their body as if they were clothing, some are just regular naked. None of them actually know who has the truest natural form, and who is influenced by what they think a succubi “should” look like based on their progenitor

Since a succubus has natural magic, they are worse at practicing intentional magic, but not as bad off as you would think -- ability to shapeshift means you can maintain and go back to one very specific personal magical profile, one you really optimize for. Most succubi have only one form they can usefully wield magic in, no matter how inappropriate, and it’s usually some kind of bizarre twist on their “base” form.

Most succubi present as female, of course, but some are male, and are called “incubi”. They are just like falcons -- did you know that “falcon” refers to the type of bird as a whole or to females, and males specifically are “tiercels”? I thought that was interesting.

Succubi require food like any other living thing, but need another source of energy as well: energy created by lust, adoration, corruption, attention. The need of mortals to have them. The ache of not having them. The indelible marks left on their skin, on their lives. The webs woven by the succubi around them. Succubi need something to occupy their minds, something deep to delve into. They have a form of immortality, but it requires corrupting mortals to a state where they are so similar that infusing their essence into the mortal maintains continuity of identity for both, so they need mortals who think like them.  
Succubi need a purpose. They need to be important. They need intellectual challenges. 

They need to be understood.

They need to not be alone.

**Corruption**

There’s something that has to be addressed before going into the succubi, as it’s so core to their purpose and being: Corruption. This is portrayed as “suffusing someone with supernatural evil or supernatural sluttiness until their old values are burned away” in more tawdry stories, but this isn’t the case. Succubi have supernatural ability to preserve changes in mentality, but not to invoke them. They must do that the old-fashioned way. What they define as corruption is very similar to the traditional definition: for someone to change or go back on their values based on a new position they are in and pleasures offered to them.

Originally so designated because they would be corrupting influential figures into betraying their people because of the pleasures they offer, now it means using pleasures and knowledge and conditioning to change a person’s outlook, values, or mentality. Making someone a depraved, cock-thirsty slut is corruption. But taking a depraved, cock-thirsty slut and making her into a devoted Stepford lover is also corruption. Introducing someone to a kink that will define their sexual needs, or taking away the need for a kink that defines them. 

_Changing_ them.

**The Invasion Force**

The Foul isn’t the only source of evil in the world, just the biggest. Out in the multiverse, there is a teeming plane of hatred and malice that sought to spread suffering to all possible realities out of avarice, out of spite. They conquer worlds and turn them into torture chambers so they will grow more powerful. It’s called, they think, The Inferno. But it’s been a while.

The Inferno scried upon the world of Eilverra and saw a world ripe for taking, destruction. The infinitely subtle flesh-weavers of Inferno engineered seeds of life that would grow in Eilverra’s environment to beings of their design, the succubi. They would use their irresistible wiles to tempt mortals, undermine and corrupt them, turn them against each other. Not only could they assume any form the viewer liked, they could impersonate specific mortals to further sow confusion. Their minds were optimized for scheming, keeping track of deep, circuitous plans. They could infect subverted mortals with their own infernal essence and turn them to the side of the succubi. Their natural horns were not just for show -- they could transmit information to each other to keep track of goings on, to make sure not to step on each other’s toes. Every succubus knew her name and the name of every one she met, from Agent-0001 to Agent-6666.

The succubi were placed all over every continent of the world (meaning evidence of succubus activity on Undzuli or Xal’Qubbor is highly sought by historians), and infiltrated societies like insidious, creeping vines that break the foundation of a house. A succubus did not give the orders of Mad Empress Margherita, but did ensure the madwoman would rise to power. Plots. Seduction. Betrayals. Assassinations. Subtle schemes, always five steps ahead of any mortal who would stop them. The world would be unable to mount a defense against the hordes of Inferno.

Every living succubus today who was one of the original 6,666 infiltrators claims that they were starting to grow fond of Eilverra, after having lived in it alongside its peoples. They say they were all doubting their mission, intentionally slacking off and undermining it, each one afraid because she thought she was the only one whose loyalties turned. Some of them are telling the truth, some are lying, the relative proportions don’t matter.

Because one fateful day 22 years into their infiltration mission, a day they would know as The Abandoning, each received a mental transmission through their horns. It repeated for a solid week, so any succubus who was shapeshifted at the time would eventually catch it. It went as such:
    
    
    SCRYERS TOO EAGER - ENERGY RECALCULATED - WORLD TOO DISTANT - INVASION INEFFICIENT - CEASE OPERATIONS - AGENTS WILL NOT BE RECALLED - ALTER PLANS ACCORDINGLY

The first, last, and only time they ever heard from their creators was being told that their mission was too expensive to carry out and they would not be recovered. They were abandoned here with no purpose and no way out. Over their clandestine telepathic network one question echoed from mind to mind:

“Fuck, now what?”

**The Inferno**

The Inferno’s works were never felt on Eilverra again. If you are worried about what they did to other, closer, easier to invade worlds, fret not: as it turns out, the weakness of this limitless demonic horde is “someone with a shotgun who is literally too angry to die”. They opened an invasion portal, they started a fight they could not finish, some events occurred, some glories were killed, some damage was quadded, and the Inferno isn’t a problem any more.

**Secrets and Discoveries**

Well, what was next for the succubi was what they’d been doing already: a whole lot of hiding. But now they weren’t hiding as a means to accomplish something. Some of them tried to hold to their mission as it was the only way they knew how to exist, but now, they could no longer rely on other succubi deliberately trying not to trip them up. There were raging arguments over their psychic network, undermined by the plain fact that everyone, no matter how passionately they argued what the next step should be, clearly had no idea and didn’t believe their own words so much as they wanted to believe them.

They could live in this world, they could find companionship -- indeed, they needed to, or they would starve to death, go insane, or both. But they were pretending to be other people, whether taking over a missing life or just fabricating an identity from whole cloth. The holidays were the worst. Festivals and feasts to celebrate a shared heritage, an identity that brought neighbors together in pride, that reminded everyone what it meant to be who they are… that a succubus could only feel a pale and hollow imitation of, looking in upon as if through a rain-slick window onto a warm hearth.

But as they lived, they learned. They didn’t come with an instruction manual for how they worked, they just knew what they were supposed to do. As they did, they created some anniversaries. Holidays to celebrate who they were, and what they learned, and how they lived.

The first discoveries were not made on a specific date, as they were independently discovered by many. Obviously, their need for carnal pleasures and need to pay rent had an obvious solution: work as a prostitute! Ask your sisters for tips on the best brothels to work, or street corners underserved, or stripper poles in need of licking. Succubi had been having dangerous manic episodes ever since the Abandoning, which was a huge risk to staying hidden. But it was soon discovered this wasn’t due to lack of some control signal from back home, it was due to lack of simulation: without complex invasion plans and betrayals to turn over in their minds, they would have bouts of madness. But if you had something else very complicated to think about, and that mental energy was occupied, you would be fine -- as fine as they knew how to be, anyway. Succubi got hobbies, and many went into chemistry, alchemy and engineering. Being a wizard was not enough, because it’s about learning spells until they become subconsciously available, but in-depth magical theory works.

One of the most important early discoveries, allowed only through collaboration with each other, was how they fed. They were not engineered for long-term self-sustaining, after all. They knew they needed lust, but it wasn’t enough. They knew they needed to make an impact on mortal lives and be remembered and longed for, to corrupt their view of the world until the succubus was an indelible part of it, but that was not enough either. But in correlating the experiences of two succubi, Agent-5762 and Agent-5763, those who had devoted their intellectual pursuits to mathematics figured out that not only were both needed, as they suspected, but the energy returned was a function of the geometric mean of [lust energy] and [corruption energy]. The math was very complicated and as it turns out it was off by a little bit, but still Morning’s Famine is the day you have sex with everyone you know without saying a word, and Evening’s Famine is the day you abstain from sex and give your friends small gifts.

Next was Agent-1408’s discovery of the sigil, now honored on Sigil’s Awakening. They had been intended to wring mortals out and use them up when they had nothing more of value to offer, and hadn’t been thinking of long-term corruption. They had the ability to brand others with fell power to mark them as useful or disposable for other succubi. But Agent-1408 found that she could engrave upon the flesh, and upon the soul, a sigil as her own signature. Every succubus developed her own sigil as her personal, unique touch on those she affected.

Witch-hunters of the day would learn of the sigils, and take them as foul glyphs that warped mortal thoughts to corruption. This is actually backwards. Succubi were not engineered with any supernatural means of compelling obedience or altering thoughts, because the traditional carnal means were enough for the short term. The sigil doesn’t command thoughts or personality. The succubus corrupts someone the old-fashioned way, opening their horizons, granting them joys unheard of, coaxing them further and further… and the sigil is how she signs her work. Makes it more real, permanent. The mortal must always accept it willingly (though maybe impulsively) and instead of altering them, it makes it more difficult to change back. It’s easier to act in the new way, than to fall back on old habits and ways of thinking. Those heavily corrupted by a succubus will be marked with many sigils, some only visible in ultraviolet light, some simple tattoos, some visibly glowing from within. Each one can tell you what every single one of them meant and how treasured it is.

A joyous occasion some years later was a gift given to Agent-3362. Infiltrating Nahui-Citli, she had become a submissive surrogate-daughter slave once she knew she would no longer need to pull the strings of power. Impregnated by her loving adoptive mother 52 years ago, she at last gave birth -- to a child who had vivid pink skin, stubby horns, and little underdeveloped bat wings. She gave the child the name they had decided upon, “Ichtaka”, and she would be known not as Agent-6667, but as Ichtaka-6667. Succubi had borne and sired children before, always of the other partner’s race, but here they discovered that sometimes -- not often, not often at all, but sometimes -- they could be blessed with another of their own.

3362 could not explain her daughter, nor could she coerce the infant to shapeshift into a Dark Elf, so she fled into the night -- which is why the Feast of Ichtaka’s Blossom is held in the afternoon, and all food that isn’t eaten by dusk must lay untouched for the rest of the night, to remind all that even with this gift they must leave something behind. 

Agent-0117 was the first to have a mortal propose her for marriage, without any attempt to manipulate her; it’s very good luck to declare your intentions on Ringsday, and now it’s become a low-key holiday for pretty much any race that has greeting cards.

Unfortunately, before too long, the succubi began to learn that calling other races “mortals” was nothing more than an affectation. Though they were well-crafted, and could live long, it wasn’t going to be forever. They started to die. Only 15 new succubi had been born since they learned it was possible, but not only were some of them being hunted and destroyed as evil shape shifting infiltrators (which, to be fair, they kind of were), they began to pass of old age, developing a wasting condition called Unmaking. We now know Unmaking is caused when a succubus’s energy needs get more and more exacting, and she starts to require a ratio of lust and corruption that is too specific to actually sustain, given local mana fluctuations. There was no possible way they could reproduce faster than they died, and they resigned themselves that they would dwindle and pass into nothing, forgotten by all. There were less than 3,000 of them by the time the psychic network received the message of hope:

“Hey everybody! This is Stacy-4048, what are you gals up to?”

Agent-4048 had not been assigned to Carrot Valley, she found Stacy out on her own. And she fell in love. She sired as many children as Stacy desired, which was a lot, and spent every minute possible with her, and when it was Stacy’s time to return to the warren, 4048 returned with her. With every tryst, every honeyed word in Stacy’s long ears, she became more like a succubus in thought and being. And the longer 4048 stayed near the Eggregore deep in the heart of the warren, the more of a dizzy bimbo she became. She’d long ago stopped trying to pretend not to be a succubus, the other bunnies didn’t really get what was going on and couldn’t tell others about it if they tried, but they mostly thought “good for her and her wings!” Giggling after a couple of mimosas, Stacy and “Miss Numbers” (as she was called) had the wildest, most passionate sex of their lives. And then both of them got up the next morning, but only one of them did: a knocked-up bunny succubus named Stacy-4048.

**The Sync**

4048 had not taken over Stacy’s body. Stacy had not subsumed 4048’s essence, though that was a bit closer to it. Though at first the succubi thought that the result must have been a merger of their minds, and her traits were averaged or added together, but it turns out this isn’t accurate either.

A succubus passes on her Sync, her form, her essence, her memories, and her serial number, to a mortal who they have fully corrupted -- to a mortal who understands them so deeply and is so like them, that to merge them would not cause any significant discontinuity in identity. Someone with whom they are totally in, well, sync. The resulting being has all of the memories of both (though the old ones fade in time like everyone else’s) and their character makes perfect sense as originating from either one. They aren’t identical, and the traits of the newest mortal “win out” if there’s a small discrepancy, but it’s not so much a conflict between psyches as it is like a new actress playing the same old role with a new spin. 

This is how the succubi would live on. Passing on their ideas, their worldview, their very selves; to become a new person and yet yourself. To endure they must be understood. Leave their mark on someone until they wanted to be the succubus, until they basically already WERE. And when the way the succubi saw the world would be perpetuated, so would they as individuals. 

Stacy-4048 didn’t quite realize what had happened until people pointed it out to her, but that was a great thing to do, and the other succubi could figure out how exactly it worked since she helped! The greatest succubus holiday was named for her, and she suggested it involve painting eggs to symbolize how it celebrates a beginning of new life that you have crafted for yourself but ALSO because painting eggs is neat. She went on to be a very successful and respected succubunny indeed! She went down in history as the foremother of modern mixology, owing to her psychological need for a complicated interest combined with her short and ditzy attention span. In fact, the child in her when she awoke became its own succubaby, a feat that was very unlikely given that the shorter time a “bun” is in the “oven”, the less likely it “bakes” into a succubus. Perhaps this was explained by the divine missive she received afterward: a small symbol of a face playfully sticking its tongue out. 

The path forward was clear. To live on, they need not just change a mortal’s world, not just to make the mortal a mirror of themselves… like Stacy and Agent-4048, they would have to bridge part of that gap on their own. They would have to know and be known utterly. Two souls would become one, well before the act of passing the Sync made it official. The slow process of shaping someone, corrupting them to your desires, expanding their worldview, would be signed at each stage by the succubus’s personal sigils. They would pass on their ideas, their perceptions, and literally live forever in addition to just metaphorically. They shaped and sculpted their lovers, tested their boundaries, pushed when they could, sought out those who would make the best converts. They passed themselves on.

But they weren’t done. This new, second generation, who were both the originals and the new people, remembered their sisters who had fallen. So, with many years of new life ahead of them, they set to their task with greater fervor: for each human they corrupted, each who would willingly take on a passed serial number, they could bring back those who had fallen. Old, and new at the same time. The same role, a new actress.

**The Revelation**

At this point, many years had passed, and succubi still lived in secret. Even as they corrupted soul after soul and left their inexplicable marks on many, they only revealed the nature of their existence to those they trusted deeply enough, knew well enough that they knew they would pass their Sync to them. They had secret signals, signs to display that outsiders didn’t know but they would use to know each other (since they spent most of their time off the psychic network). Habits of dress, fashions made from bits of every culture they had inhabited with their own twist, a personal taste for dress that’s sexually flattering while exposing very little. A hidden people.

They lived like this for generations. They were still hunted and feared by those few who knew of them, and indeed some of them -- some of whom had serial numbers higher than 6666 so they weren’t there to begin with anyway -- would sow dissent or discord, or sow SOMETHING, in the hopes that carrying out some version of their mission would give them meaning or a chance to call Inferno. All succubi, even those who came after 6666, feel at least a little butthurt about the Abandoning, even though they almost universally agree that Eilverra is their home and they will fight to defend it. But there’s still a few who try to find meaning in malice. There’s a couple of jerks everywhere.

But then the calendar would be completed, because Amarisa-2739 had a problem. She was Amarisa, and before that she was Brynnhilde, and before that Greta, and before that Agent-2739. And she was all of those things, a bunch of lines that gracefully merged together into a single path. But she was also stuck. She was dying and she knew it. Her former race, human, had abandoned her, and she had taken up with an Orcish warband for safety, masquerading as an Orc. And she had grown to love Rokha, who protected her, who tested the limits of her endurance, who proved her worth. And she pined for the life the Orcs lived, of total honesty. It tore her up inside to be with such people who would give love in return for only candor, and to know she was lying to them every single second of every day. She couldn’t leave the camp and find another human to invest with her Sync. She kind of didn’t want to. She gathered her courage, took Rokha to a secluded place, and told her the truth.

Of course, Rokha and her comrades kicked the ever-loving shit out of Amarisa for her sustained deception. She was cast from the warband, exiled. Only Rokha saw her out. The caravan disappeared over the horizon. Amarisa wept. And then Rokha asked the same pivotal question asked so long ago: “Now what?”

Amarisa and Rokha could never be one -- dishonesty had a grip on Amarisa’s soul and her actions had proven it. She could not be trusted by her band, and if her survival depended on an Orc being so close to her as to be the same person, she would die helplessly. But this didn’t mean Rokha hated her, after she learned of what she was and what she had to be. So the question was: do you consider yourself an Orc, as well as a succubus? Then do not hide your true self as an Orc -- wear your true self as an Orc. You are a beast with horns, then show those horns, that all who see you know who you are. Let all who meet you know what you are and what you want and what you will give, and if any object to you baring the truth to them, I will give them one warning before I start chopping off their fingers.

Rokha broke the secret of the succubi, took their hidden occulted lives and broadcast them to anyone who could hear her, and then threatened to gruesomely maim anyone who had a problem with it. Amarisa needed someone who was so like her they would become each other, and that person couldn’t be part of her warband, so if anyone thinks they have a shot at inheriting her succubus serial number, come on and take a swing at it, you have nothing to lose.

The ploy actually wasn’t successful, and Amarisa-2739 died of Unmaking wasting her away. But she had a good number of candidates lined up that weren’t quite there yet. And other succubi were coming: notified by their whisper network, by the regular-ass network of mortal gossip, of the Orc’s declaration. 2739 died, but it did not take long after for an honest succubus to take an Orc lover, to show her the path, not to walk her to deception but understand the doubt and loyalty and strength of character… and soon she she understood what it was to be a succubus, and Grishka-2739 returned to Rokha. They nodded at each other with respect, shared a single embrace, and then parted, never to see each other again.

Orcs had a mixed reaction to the knowledge of the succubi. On the one hand, they were viscerally disgusted at creatures who were made for and made OF deception, loathing them the same way they loathed High Elves. On the other hand, it is the height of virtue to convince such creatures to bare themselves and tell the truth (which also removes them as a major threat), which High Elves would never do. So the Orcs became the unofficial “embassy” for succubi to “come out” to the rest of the world, though they had their own stipulations. You will be allowed to introduce yourself, prove your honesty to us and the world, to pass back into their world known as what you are and with your acceptance backed by our steel. If you do not know what your face should be, you may try on others to see what is truly yours. But if you ever and I mean _ever_ shapeshift away those horns to hide what you truly are, we will beat the living shit out of you at an absolute minimum and the most you can say is “all right, fair enough”. Wings, you can shapeshift those away because they are hard to fit into clothing, but we will squint at you disapprovingly. The succubi found this harsh, but fair, given the potential threat they posed -- it was a set of rules to be conclusively followed and conclusively known they were followed.

**Succubi Today**

The ceremony of Declaration takes place on the anniversary of Rokha’s announcement -- succubi no longer conceal themselves so the traditional “outing yourself” is not much more than a display of pride, but they also adorn their horns with festive decorations and have sex with anyone who asks them no matter what they’re doing. But the date at which succubi joined society was not so clear cut. It was a slow, gradual process, over many years, of people getting used to their existence and then accepting it. Succubi, for their part, were very friendly and open, eager to explain anything about themselves to anyone who asked (and prove “see, we may have been designed for evil but you don’t have to worry about us!).

Each culture had its own view and took its own pace on the issue of succubi. Dark Elves, notably, despised them and the dangers they presented to such a tense web of power. It was this moment that proved to the world that Dark Elves and Bunnies were truly allies: after enough Bunnies asked them to change their opinion, the Dark Elves actually did, and most Matriarchs provisionally accepted succubi within their realm on the Bunnies’ recommendation. And I mean, like, what? Okay, any succubus Synced with a Dark Elf is forbidden from setting foot in any halls of power, so there’s obviously some more progress they need to make, but it’s way better than what everyone expected.

Since each succubus has continuity of identity with her previous incarnations and her current self, they adapt to their settings very well. The history of the succubus is her own, the serial number she bears is her own (and succubi, confusingly to other races, do not find them depersonalizing but take GREAT pride in their serial numbers and the litany of lives attached to them), but so is her heritage as this mortal -- and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that, even if the memories of those have become foggier with time. Her traditions are a perfect syncretism of heritage and new homeland. All of those succubus holidays are not just interesting trivia; their ability to be presented to outsiders as cool things to participate in, and to syncretize with the local celebrations and feasts, are a huge part of what drove succubus acceptance by proving them to be, well, real people.

The fact they are outgoing, incredibly attractive, promiscuous, and attentive lovers certainly didn’t hurt, either. Succubi went out and integrated, and now, succubi exist all over, as members of every race. They take many forms, but always keep their horns visible, to show they are proud of who they are, to show they are not hiding, and to show they aren’t one of the few sinister succubi trying to actually spread discord who ought to have the shit kicked out of them.

Succubi are small in number -- the highest confirmed serial number belongs to Jennifer-8675309 but as more succubi are born, the range and intensity of the psychic network weakens, so there are numbers skipped and numbers repeated -- but they leave their mark. They corrupt lovers into their mindset, leaving marks on their bodies, leaving their mark on those people’s ideas. They want to leave a mark on the world, to prove who they are, who they were. Many are still sex workers, but many are also artists, inventors, philosophers, individuals who dream their deeds can shape the world. 

They project an aura of confidence, enigmatic knowledge, architects of plans within plans. All of this will fall away in an _instant_ when you bring up whatever their special intellectual interest is, as they bring out squeeing, hand-flapping glee. It can be the perfection of engineering, it can be ancient Otdikh literature, it can be the latest revision of Hyperspace Hyperwars, but meeting someone they can share that with is precious.

Because it’s not enough to leave a mark, not enough to be lusted for, you must know and be known. The quirks you picked up over many lives, the odd habits of dress, the weird way you think, your need for sex, you need people to get you, and not simply because you will eventually need to pass the Sync and incarnate in another person. You were born here and you were born here, and you were made to live here, but you were not made to live here, and no matter how distant memories fade you will always know that.

So there’s plenty of ways to be a succubus. Some of them are seductresses, or just plain ol’ sluts, corrupting people into debauchery. Some of them -- a small amount but with disproportionate impact -- dedicate themselves to knocking up as many women as they possibly can to increase the odds of making more succubi. But just as common as the thirsty debauched seducer is the very, very nice girlfriend or caring wife. Even as she maintains multiple polygamous romantic relationships (she kind of has to), she is an attentive lover, an attentive partner who wants to get to know her lovers, who wants them to know her. Do you have a hobby? Well, she wants to share it. Mix her traditions with yours. She wants to change you, but she wants to change herself. To meet in the middle. To be two as one.

And hey, odds are, you’re not going to be compatible enough to take the Sync. She doesn’t mind. Does she leave an impact on you? Leave the marks on your skin as a testament to how you have changed as a person? Did she fuck you cross-eyed? Did you love her? Are you happy? Well, that’s pretty good too.

* * *

_“Show me.”_

_Samantha opens her coat. Underneath it, her body is cradled in a shibari harness, the ropes parted at her pussy for the buzzing vibrator. Her thighs glistening with rivers of arousal._

_“And?” Jessica-3998911 asks, cupping a hand to her cheek._

_“Nobody knew a fucking thing,” Samantha says. “I came over and over. Right in front of them.” She turns to kiss Jessica, to nibble her lip, rub their bodies together._

_Jessica grabs the back of Samantha’s head and bends her in for a soul-kiss. And an intricate web of luminous lines appears on the small of her back._

* * *

_“Dinner’s ready, everyone!” Agni-218177 calls to the table. Her hands covered in potholders, she holds the large ceramic dish of roast lamb, ready to lay on the table._

_“Mmm, thanks hon!” her husband Konstantinos says, giving her a little peck on the cheek while his extended family swept away the dominoes to clear a spot for the meal. She leans into his kiss, until the side of her horn bonks the top of his head. “It’s smelled delicious since 10, we were in here going crazy for it!”_

_“Aww, thank_ you _,” Agni says with a blush. “I did my best. You’re supposed to go with traditional Dark Elf style, and their seasoning is supposed to be knockout venom, but I figured thyme and oregano would be better.”_

_“I’ve had to smell this all day without tasting it,” his niece says, “if you told me it was dipped in arsenic I’d still think pretty hard about it.”_

_Agni smiles. Konstantinos’s family is so nice to her. So ready to embrace who she was… as long as she kept piling on the seasoned meats, anyway. “Now, Ichtaka’s Blossom is a very important feast for my people,” she says as she sets down the meal. “Careful, careful, the plate is still hot. Ahem. Today we celebrate the first new succubus born in this world, but too, we must remember that she fled from her home in shame. This is why, for as great as our bounty is, we must stop eating at sunset.”_

_The extended family looks at her with a nervous tension, unsure if they needed to get somber now._

_“But I worked hard on this, so we better stuff our faces with as much as we can before then!” She grins and raises a glass of cheap wine. “Opa!”_

_“Opa!”_

* * *

_7960831 doesn’t even know her name, but doesn’t need to. The girl is laying in an incoherent post-orgasmic haze on her bed, semen drooling from her pussy, the heart design over her womb thrumming. She is knocked up, corrupted, and another chance at a new Succubus will come from her. 7960831’s job is done. Now, cover her tracks._

_Fix the rug they tripped over. Pick up the bottles. Straighten the bookshelf they slammed into when…_

_“Holy shit! Is this a first edition_ Principa Physicalis _? Where did you get this?”_

_“Guhhhh…” she moans._

_Maybe 7960831 can stick around a bit longer…_

**Succubus Characters**

Succubus names are easy: take a name from any other culture you like and add a serial number to it. If you don’t want to specifically be a very old succubus, just like roll 7d10 and take the numbers in order, and reroll if it’s a number higher than 8675309. How many generations is that, how many times has each generation Synced, what is the number of past Syncs your character should have? Don’t worry about it, Mark! The number is whatever you want it to be. Time Scooch means never having to say you’re sorry.

A Succubus character has a goal. There are a couple who will sit back and let life happen to them and roll along with the waves, but it’s not how the original Succubi were wired and not many would change themselves enough to Sync up with someone with that kind of personality. No, your Succubus is out there with an objective, whatever it is. If she’s a submissive Stepford wife in a life of domestic tranquility, it’s because she said “I need some domestic tranquility and I am going to go grab some.” 

If she goes out on adventures, in civilization or the wilds, it’s in order to accomplish something -- even if it’s “make a name for myself by being a huge hero who is idolized and sought after and leaves my mark on many.” She’s almost certainly fucking her entire group of companions, and maybe in doing so she’s sizing up who stands where in respect to her goals.

And there’s several goals she could have. She always has something she kinda needs to be doing. She needs to corrupt people by leaving her mark on them. She needs to fucka nd be fucked and be an object of lust. She needs to intimately know and change people to find someone close enough for her to Sync. She may want to know and change someone into something else, to Sync them with her dead Succubus colleague. Or she may want to breed as many people as she can. In some way she has to make a mark.

But so too do those experiences mark her. All that stuff about holidays isn’t just trivia, but it’s not like she has to be obsessed with holidays, she’s not Calendar Man. It’s about establishing tradition and finding the significance of events that happen to you. Syncretizing who you were and who you are. Not only will a succubus probably be aware of other people’s customs and celebrations, not only will she participate in any kind of local bacchanalia that may be going on, she’s probably going to bring a sort of ritual rhythm to the group. What celebration you do before going on a dungeon delve or coming back from one, or nightly spin-the-bottle events for group cohesion, or some kind of story-telling around the campfire on spooky nights, or deciding who will do ugly tasks by being the last one to put their finger to their nose, she’s likely to be the one interested in those “we do this together so we know who we are because we’re the people who do this together” kind of things. When things happen to her, she wants to remember them and how they changed her. She’s probably got a lot of anniversaries for various types of things tracked in her head, and she doesn’t expect everyone to be like “oh yeah it’s the six-month anniversary of the first time you gave me head here’s my greeting card” but she will be like “hey why don’t we do that again because it’s the six-month anniversary.” New experience, made a mark, commemorated, bing bang boom.

Ultimately in hentai fantasy succubi end up going the same way most of the time, they’re lewd, they’re slutty, they make others lewd and slutty. You have varying interpretations of your reasons for doing that, different ways to go about it, and different directions to go with it, but it’s still going to be about that. You just have to think about what is your twist on it. Who did you used to be before you Synced with the succubus? How did that leave a mark on you? Who was your last Sync before you? How far apart were they? How much do you change in one incarnation? 

I mean, it’s a well-worn role, everyone knows it, but it’s being played by a new actress with her own take.


	9. I Am A Shadow, The Lewd Self: The Sisterhood of Mahou Shoujo

_(content warning: mind break, corruption, clonecest, resetting to get corrupted over and over again, wolf-and-sheepdog friendships, monsters of the week, implied oujosama laughter)_

The Foul’s tendrils are everywhere, prying at the seams of reality, of civilization, seeking to tear things apart. Once it starts some method of usurpation, it will continue it forever. And ever. And ever. Even when there’s no way of it actually succeeding, just to waste your fucking time, just to get you bored enough to start slipping.

Modern people think that the Foul is dealt with, adequately contained. This is true. They think this means the Foul is not a threat. This is very, very false. It is only through the heroic and unsung efforts of many people that the world can be kept safe from The Foul’s attempts to destroy it, undermine it, and generally fuck with it.

The Foul seeks to debase, degrade, demoralize. It wants those who fight it to give up, give in, surrender to everything they are not, forfeit that which gives them strength because the fight is no longer in their blood. For the Sisterhood of magical girls empowered by their purity to protect the world they love, the Foul wants nothing more than to degrade and defile them, wipe away the purity from which they draw strength and leave nothing but selfishness and hedonism in its wake. And no matter how pure and noble the heart, eventually, it will fall.

But, if you know someone’s going to be out to corrupt you anyway, wouldn’t you rather it be someone you trust? If you know you’re going to fall to corruption, shouldn’t you figure out how to keep fighting anyway? And why let an asshole like the Foul get in on all the fun?

**The Cycle of Corruption**

Oaths have power in Eilverra. Not just in the metaphorical sense, that they bind you and deepen trust. Knowing your magical profile can make you much more powerful at magic, especially if you can make sure you’re keeping a “channel” open you know you won’t interfere with, and holding to an oath is how you keep that channel open. Mahou shoujo -- the magical girls -- literally gain power from their purity, specializing in flashy, destructive and/ or purifying spells that are made much more powerful and efficient because they are pure in spirit.

But this purity isn’t just an ironclad commitment to defending the ideals of love and justice, it’s denying pleasures of the flesh. Remaining not simply chaste, but untouched by the concept of sexuality. And of course nobody can keep this up forever in our world, much less a horny planet like Eilverra. All of the sexuality they suppress, the siren song of impurity, the aspects of herself she denies, the corruption that tempts a magical girl, all of it has a physical manifestation in the form of that magical girl’s Shadow -- an independent copy of herself, covered in succubus glyphs of corruption and eyes glowing with lewd taint, who schemes and plots and desires nothing more than to break the magical girl’s mind with pleasure and make her surrender to her impure lusts. 

And eventually, they will triumph. Alone or with evil assistance, slowly wearing their copy down or capturing and overwhelming her, they _will_ break the magical girl’s purity and leave her hopelessly lewd, thinking of nothing but lust and corruption. The Shadow will slip into the magical girl’s life and usurp her place, masquerading as her. In time, in not very much time, the Shadow has totally replaced the magical girl… so much so that she has forgotten she was ever the Shadow. So much so she thinks she’s a heroic and pure defender of love and justice who is untainted by anything lewd. Meanwhile, the broken magical girl sees the purity of the former Shadow and becomes the Shadow herself, scheming to unmake and corrupt her.

A successful magical girl’s career will have this transfer happen dozens of times. It will happen in several enticing, exciting ways, as the magical girl learns more about her Shadow and thus herself. Not only will she experience the feeling of giving into her pleasures she had long denied like a dozen times over, she will get to know, and to be, her own dark side in a way that few others do. To experience that cathartic moment where all her resistance breaks down and she is forever changed by her desires again, and again, and again.

**Magical Girl Raising Project**

Many years ago there was a Succubus with a dumb idea. Her name was Kisaragi-0108 and she lived in the bustling Yamatan port city of “Kappakappa Town”, a place constantly menaced by beasts of the Foul, where mortals were tempted with powers and minions to allow them to indulge their basest, pettiest desires. These dark sorcerers gain their power by draining the life essence of other mortals, which they did by having their minions assault mortals openly, whether with flesh-rending violence or just by kicking them in the shins a few times. Empowered by pettiness and spite, they waged a campaign of secret terrorism that guardsmen could not stop.

Kisaragi-0108 wanted to stop all of this, to defend her adopted home. That’s not the dumb part, that’s good. The dumb part is that this was before Succubi were revealed to the world and on the road to acceptance, and she _somehow_ got it in her head that the Foul was created by the Succubi’s arrival, and since Succubi were so horny, it MUST be that they’d tainted the world with their sexuality. So to fight off the Foul, she reasoned one must be chaste and sexually pure.

I know, right? I mean, even though Eilverra is more sex-forward than some other worlds I can name, people do still have issues. Personal hangups and that kind of shit. They’re still _people_. So yeah, I mean, it’s not unheard of for sex to be involved in some kind of unpleasantness. But… really? All of it? That’s what you think is wrong with the world? 

She turned her obsessive Succubus focus to the study of occult chastity. And there wasn’t much existing knowledge to study. So she started making her own through experimentation. As an impure creature of lust, she could never herself employ this power, but she could understand it and pass it to others. Enlisting volunteers from those harmed by the Foul, those who were pissed at its existence (but never revealing her nature to them), she tried again and again to empower agents of purity to fight the Foul’s corruption. Her efforts made progress, but not enough for her. She aimed to shape them into ideals of chaste beauty or innocent cuteness, she had the purity-empowered spells working right, but they _always_ fell and lost their purity. No matter how happy each subject may have been about it, Kisaragi always took it as more proof of how terribly her people had fucked up this world. 

For a while, she would sate her sexual needs on these fallen girls, since it was safest for both of them and it was only fair she be the one to feed the dark hunger she had empowered. And they really, really liked it. Not that that was a factor in her decision. Ahem. But after a while she stopped doing even that. She started to get delirious and manic from hunger. She was in a fugue when she developed the core theory of her final model, and had to decipher it later from wild notes she had written all over her walls. Neither she nor any magical girl who came afterward actually knows, on a fundamental level, why it works.

It wasn’t enough to deny one’s desires, that was still part of it, but you had to PUT them somewhere. Physically remove them with a symbolic act. She developed a system to cast off these desires, this impurity, and throw it somewhere else. It would be most effective when first employed on people -- almost always girls -- at or around the age of their sexual awakening, a time brimming with symbolic potential. Shunting that mystical potential into something else would empower them. She had turned to sending out animal familiars, cute ones, to find promising subjects to fight the Foul empowered by their purity. The first girl she used her new process on was Yoko Tsukino, who would come to be known as Sparkling Princess Kissy-Kiss, a name that made _perfect_ sense to a manic and starving Kisaragi-0108. 

Yoko was herself a stablehand, a common girl with a common job and common problems. She knew she was attractive, she knew she could have her pick of partner or partners, she could be a secret treasure or a figure of lust. She just didn’t, you know, know what she wanted. How sexual she wanted to be, what kind of person she would mature into. Kind of what it means to come of age, you know? This sort of internal frission made her the perfect candidate: Kisaragi saw an impurity, a doubt, that could be tangibly cast out to empower her. And it worked! She became a figure of hope and justice, fighting for her friends and for chaste and pure love. She maintained a secret identity as Yoko, an ordinary stablehand, to protect herself from those who would do her harm or stain her, and by night went to fight the forces of evil that menaced the town. 

Said force of evil at the time was a shadowy sorceror known only as The Phantom of Sorrow, an unknown silhouette in a voluminous cloak. When the Foul makes an incursion into the world, it tends to keep at it, so The Phantom of Sorrow had picked up a source of Foul-tainted creatures from a previous sorceror and was commanding them to harvest the life energy of the frightened townsfolk to prolong its sinister life. Nobody could oppose them, they couldn’t even agree on their existence. Until Sparkling Princess Kissy-Kiss.

It is hard to overstate how completely Kissy-Kiss fucking obliterated The Phantom of Sorrow and its minions. Her purity and certainty were anathema to the seething nothingness of the Foul, so, like, it wasn’t even a hot knife through butter because butter still has enough resistance you can tell you’re cutting something. It was a hot knife made of rainbow sparkles slicing through air. Every time a creature emerged, Kissy-Kiss rocked its shit and got a little closer to its leader. For every one of the Phantom’s lieutenants, twisted by their own hate and resentment, she showed them the hope and love that still existed in the world and turned them from the path of darkness.

When she finally made it to The Phantom of Sorrow, said Phantom planned to give a speech starting with “Well, Princess, you have finally made it to my lair, counting on your power of love to save you.” It got as far as “wuh” before Kissy-Kiss grabbed its creepy skull head (it turned out to be a skeleton, by the way), smashed it into its menacing stone throne, and reduced it to dust with a point-blank Starlight Kiss. Where past magical girls fell after a month or two from their repressed desires, Sparkling Princess Kissy-Kiss fought the Foul for over a year and cleaned out her problem definitively. Kisaragi-0108 devoted all her time and energy to supporting Kissy-Kiss, and they say she wasn’t even starving as badly at that point.

But then, the Shadow came. She wore a guise but underneath she was a simulacrum of Yoko, created by all that she had shunted off and denied. Unbeknownst to Kisaragi, the Shadow had been corrupting her charge for a while, in secret trysts, providing strategic aid to the Phantom’s minions to allow them to tempt and tease her even as she cleaved through them. Yoko had kept it all secret, of course, because she was a good girl! But she could not last forever. Eventually, her Shadow captured and broke her, leaving her nothing more than, quote, “a cockslut sow with heart-shaped pupils who only wants to be a gangbang pig, uh, slutty, a slutty pig, but like the sexy kind, whatever just get those pants off!” Yoko didn’t even have a mirror to see the shape of her eyes, she just knew.

Kisaragi-0108 fell into despair. Her project was a failure, the Foul would never be defeated, and instead of protecting Yoko she had created the means of her downfall, the creature that would destroy her and take over her life. She vanished into her home, into a lake of tears and booze.

And then a week later, Yoko came to her door, asking where she had been, because they needed to go fight evil and she couldn’t do it without her good friend and mentor Kisaragi. 

Yoko hadn’t recovered. This was Yoko’s Shadow. She had taken over Yoko’s life so completely that she had taken over her memory and purity and courage and desire to save the world her friends loved. She had forgotten she was ever the Shadow at all.

Kisaragi helped her, of course, providing the support and intel to Sparkling Princess Kissy-Kiss that she always had. There were still rogue monsters to be fought, and always the odds of another sorcerer picking them up for his or her own evil ends. But Kisaragi also sought out the depraved cockslut that the original Yoko had become. And when she found her -- well, first thing, the now-futanari Yoko jumped her and fucked her absolutely silly, acting out all the lust she had repressed and denied, meeting the sexual needs Kisaragi had ignored. But then after a hazy fog of orgasms and creampies, they talked. Yoko remembered her past as the noble and pure Sparkling Princess Kissy-Kiss. She wasn’t a helpless, passive slut waiting for cocks to be directed to her mouth like she had claimed she’d become. She was driven, determined to corrupt her former Shadow as she had been corrupted. She masturbated openly to the thoughts of what she would do when she had her former Shadow right where she wanted, to break her mind with pleasure. Show her she was wrong to abandon the idea of being a shameless fucking machine.

So Kisaragi couldn’t just let _that_ go. She decided to help both Yokos. One as Kissy-Kiss, helping her fight evil, and the other as a corrupt Shadow, scheming to break and stain the noble and pure heroine. With Kisaragi’s covert help, acting as if she were a Foul sorcerer that the Shadow was a minion of the pure heroine was broken inside of three months, her eyes with the heart-shaped pupils rolling back in her head in pure shameless bliss, reduced to a cockslut cockpig cock-addicted etc etc etc. She had fallen.

One week later, Kisaragi expected Yoko to come to her door, but she didn’t. It took Yoko two weeks this time, because she was feeling very under the weather for a while.

**Magical Girl Remodeling Plan**

Well THIS was interesting. And heartening. Over the time the new Kissy-Kiss was corrupted, it seemed like as she fell further toward depravity, she recovered more knowledge of her past and the Shadow’s nature. And this just made her more determined to keep her purity and fight for her friends. She helped the new-old Shadow corrupt the old-new Yoko again, just enough for her to start to remember.

Then she sat them both down for a talk.

The only thing the two didn’t agree on was that both _insisted_ they were the original Yoko, and the other was the fake created by magic. The one who Kisaragi thought was the first Shadow said she was corrupted before Kisaragi even noticed, and the other one said that was total bullshit. Other than that, all their memories lined up. The Shadow was obviously intelligent and coherent, she was able to have a sit-down meeting across the table from the target of her sexual obsession without any difficulty. Aside from purity vs lewdness, they had recognizably the same personality, just one was twisted up in sexual desire the other suppressed. Even the Shadow still cared about defending the world; part of the pure sexual satisfaction she would gain from breaking her rival would be taking her place as the REAL defender of hope and justice. 

This needed further study. Kisaragi needed to replicate this, to learn how it worked, to see how to employ it. More time in the lab would be needed, and more magical girls. She couldn’t provide the support she once did, while she focused on this. So she asked for a favor: “Shadow, while you are scheming to corrupt and defile Yoko, could you also use your contacts in the dark underworld of lust to make sure she gets information on who to fight and the resources she needs to maintain her identity? Someone else shows up to start flinging monsters around, maybe you pretend you were already there and you get to be their boss, keep an eye on them. I mean, you DO care about saving the world too, after all. Between you and her magical familiar, can you handle it?”

The Shadow rejected this offer. Then Kisaragi clarified: she was only referring to the person who was the Shadow right at this moment, and she wasn’t making any comment on who was the original. The Shadow, happy to have been given respect, then easily agreed. 

Yoko knew the envelopes and dead drops from her mysterious benefactor that granted her what she needed to fight evil were coming from her Shadow, seeking to corrupt and defile her, each boon containing the seed of her downfall. But she had no other choice, already remembered the cycle, and she thought that knowing what was coming would help her resist that siren call. Then again, she knew it was coming and still walked into it anyway. She told herself the writing was on the wall, but said writing was clearly exciting her. . And when they inevitably swapped places, the new Yoko accepted the mysterious benefactor’s help guilelessly.

Kisaragi moved on to another town, another one with a seething underbelly of uncontrolled Foul sorcery. This time she enlisted an entire team: the Kitty Force Five, five girls of diverse races and backgrounds and personalities, united by their power of friendship, with color-coordinated and extremely frilly, extremely marketable outfits. Who were, to one extent or another, unsure of how to delineate their friendship from their sexual desires for their comrades -- they wanted to remain friends, and wanted to go to the next level but weren’t sure how, so they had great desires to split off.

And once they were empowered, Kisaragi found their Shadows, a group of sinister simulacra who met in a dark room where only their mouths were illuminated so others could see their evil smug smiles and all the times they licked their lips. Infiltrating the underworld, with their fingers in many sinister soups, to coordinate the sexual downfall of the Kitty Force Five. Guiding everything to its inevitable, lewd conclusion. Great. While you Shadow girls are doing that and -- yes, I know you are the originals, let me finish -- while you’re doing that evil scheme to take their purity, can you make sure all these evil things are doing as little harm as possible, and you cover your tracks by making sure the Kitty Force defeats all the bad guys you employ before you’re done? Like when you send out these Foul creatures, make sure they aren’t wrecking stuff too badly. Just enough to be, you know, exciting. Get them all amped up. You can? Okay, cool. 

The fall of the Kitty Force Five took a few years, and Kisaragi barely helped, she just observed. The Kitty Force could rely on each other to keep their intentions pure and noble, but once they fell, they fell _hard_. Once Kitty Mew Mew Turquoise had fallen into hopeless shameless depravity, she was kept secret, then used as leverage to infect the rest of the group, one by one turning them to lewdness and filling each girl with the desire to corrupt and fuck her friends. At last their leader, Kitty Mew Mew Pink, was bound and shackled before her Shadow, while surrounded by her friends wrapped in writhing pillars of tentacle flesh and trapped in the throes of ecstasy, and the last of the Kitty Force surrendered to carnal pleasure. Her pupils went heart-shaped, that’s how you know.

And the old Shadows took over and became the Kitty Force Five, while their dopplegangers lusted for their corruption. Longed not only to taste the pleasures of their flesh, but prove that these newly-purified warriors should always have been fucking their friends ceaselessly.

The cycle wasn’t just a one-off. This would work consistently. Kisaragi refined the transformation and purification technique, the empowered evil-smiting magics, until the magical animal companions she sent out could teach them on their own. And she started sending familiars in pairs: one for the magical girl, one for the Shadow, to show them the ropes and get them on the right track, get them in contact with more experienced magical girls.

**Magical Girl R(eturns)**

When Kisaragi returned to her hometown, she was surprised. Sparkling Princess Kissy-Kiss was still a local legend and mythical foe of evil, but Yoko herself had fallen on hard times. The stable had closed down, and she was unable to find a steady job… so she was crashing on her Shadow’s couch for a while. Just until she found her feet again. They had a rule set up for their conflict: no corruption or purification at home, or within an hour of leaving, so you can’t just jump one the moment they walk out of the house. Also, because Yoko wasn’t paying rent, she has to do all the cleaning, that’s only fair.

Wait, purification? Yes. They had swapped places a few more times, enough that Kisaragi could no longer deduce who was the original, and both still claimed to be. But not all of those switches had been inevitable falls to depravity: at least twice, the light incarnation had resisted the Shadow’s depredations long enough to show her the power of chaste love and friendship, showing her she didn’t need to be lusted after by many to have worth as a person, redeeming and purifying her… and then, of course, the light incarnation became consumed with lust for her newly-purified charge, becoming the Shadow. 

The two Yokos had worked out a pretty functional relationship. The Shadow has a limited shapeshifting ability, though nothing as powerful as a succubus, just enough to pretend to be “someone else”. In the early stages of the cycle, the Shadow would just pretend to be someone else, a distant landlady who sometimes passed off envelopes with mysterious evil-fighting messages. She’d just keep to the rules herself. But when the magical girl had been taunted, teased, pleasured, enticed, corrupted enough to regain enough memories to recall what was going on -- a point that came sooner and sooner -- the Shadow dropped the act and both of them remained on friendly terms at arm’s reach, obeying the rules for each other’s sake. It was sort of like a game, but not quite. More like… a debate. One side represents “I do not want my self-worth to be contingent on other people’s sexual lust for me” and the other “indulging in and being pleasured by the sexuality of others is rewarding and there’s no reason not to do it”, and you know, you go out on the podium, you get your argument and rebuttal and counter-rebuttal, got your ten minutes, you try and make the case, nobody needs to start throwing elbows..

They were, in fact, pretty chill about it. Chill enough that when the current Kissy-Kiss was frog-tied on the floor of a tavern, pussy spread wide open, exhorting everyone there to please use and abuse her every hole because she had given up on purity and only wanted to be a depraved slut, it was only after she made sure her Shadow had secured her wallet and keys and they wouldn’t go flying off of her scandalously revealing outfit while she was gang-banged.

(The tavern-goers, having heard rumors of this kind of thing or having participated themselves, and knowing Sparkling Princess Kissy-Kiss stays around after them, figured that she’s not the real deal and it’s just a weird fetish thing some people have for pretending to be a mind-broken magical girl.)

Yoko wasn’t pretending to resist, of course. She was struggling with all her heart to hold on to her purity, and she even knew it was possible to win. But, well, you may as well have a backup plan, right? And if you HAVE to fall to someone, I mean, if it’s a possibility… they might as well be someone you’re friends with. It’s not like it SCARED her to fall into corruption. She knew she’d done it before. She wanted to resist it to prove she was right. And she wanted to inflict it to prove she was right. The thought of giving in to corruption thrilled her, but only because it stood against what she stood for. Maybe all her resistance would make the fall more exciting. You know, like a bungee jump or something. And maybe if she turned the tables on her Shadow that validation would be worth anything to feel.

Her Shadow, for her part, was helping too. She didn’t just want to corrupt her light half out of lust, though oh baby did she have a lot of that, she wanted to help her to realize what she truly wanted. She wanted her own proof she was right. So whenever some new evildoers popped up, the Shadow was always in charge of them, always ensuring that what they did was less able to hurt and terrorize people and more to provide Yoko with thrilling challenges to overcome that pushed her toward accepting lewdness.

Kisaragi’s heart swelled with pride. She had made a sisterhood of magical warriors who could withstand the depredation of the Foul and protect this world with their purity. She hadn’t cleansed them of the sexual taint she thought she had brought to Eilverra but, you know, there’s two of them, and each of them spends half their time pure, so it averages out. Yoko seemed pretty happy with her Shadow, so maybe it wasn’t all bad. She got degraded and the whole heart-shaped whatever, but what actually happened was never as bad as she said it was when she fell, and she seemed to be bouncing back okay. Heck, what the magical girl declared about how much she had fallen wasn’t just always more severe than what happened, it was more severe than even what the Shadow thought was happening. Kisaragi sent forth the familiars all over the world to contact promising candidates to become magical girls, guide them in their ways, get them in contact with more experienced magical girls, and set up their Shadows for a smooth transition when the time came.

Some people say that Kisaragi-0108 died happy and surrounded by loved ones, having not passed her Sync to anyone, and watches over all magical girls in spirit. Some say she is still around, hiding her nature, appearing as a mentor figure or mysterious benefactor to magical girls in need. They even say that she attained a peace where she no longer needed lust to live, and drew her sustenance from the admiration and respect of magical girls. She was a weirdo, and she was wrong about a lot of things, but she did her best with what she had and made something good in the world and that is what counts.

**Me and My Shadow**

Magical girls come from all races and all walks of life, and all of them have a Shadow. In many ways, it’s the most important relationship of her life. Her Shadow is everything she lusts for and denies. Everything she would never admit she needs. The traits she would never acknowledge, whether flaws or merits. Who she longs to be and longs never to be. She is superego, and her Shadow is id.

(remember: each half thinks they are the original, and so “Shadow” always refers to whoever is currently the Shadow -- when they switch places, they will switch sides in the dynamic.)

Every magical girl’s relationship with her Shadow is unique, and like any important relationship, it will shift over time. And while they are all unique, there are general patterns that can be observed, though they are just tendencies and not ironclad rules. 

At the beginning of her career, within the first few swaps, the magical girl knows nothing of the Shadow. And don’t worry about if she’s too young, the Shadow’s corruption always advances at a rate that serves as a perfect dramatic metaphor for her natural sexual awakening. She is innocence of some kind, often but not necessarily naivete. Her Shadow wants, she craves, she has urges, but may not even fully understand what those urges are. Part of her drive to corrupt is the drive to understand these things about herself. In a real sense, corruption is a continuous process of self-discovery, refining and rarefying what they truly want to be.

But after a few cycles around, the magical girl will start to remember the corruption once she is partially corrupted. Usually, the more cycles she’s been through, the earlier she remembers. She’s aware there is someone out there who seeks to corrupt and defile her, and resolves to hold on to her purity and fight off this intrusion with the power of her chaste love. She gradually becomes aware that this Shadow is a reflection of herself, and this usually makes her more resolved to resist, to defeat the darkness of her own heart.

Then she gets to the point where she knows very early on that her Shadow exists, and her Shadow has much more practice corrupting her, and this is where things really diverge. Many form an amicably hostile working relationship with their Shadow, laying down rules their conflict will obey and allowing the possibility of cooperation for goals they have in common. And for some, that amicable hostility becomes actual friendship, a friendship for someone who you respect so much that you try to let them see your way of viewing the world purely for the sake of their happiness. For some, it becomes a game of one-upmanship. Learning from each past cycle, always striving to do better and beat their counterpart this time, from what they have learned of their desires and their inner nature.

Though each individual half believes they are the original, they can remember which individual was the Shadow and which was the magical girl for the past few cycles. Even though they don’t draw much experience from the role they aren’t currently occupying, they can get smug about their performance in each role and how much better they are than their other half. They will use private and secret names to refer to each other as individuals regardless of what role they are currently occupying, but cannot tolerate a name implying one came second or isn’t the “real” original, so there’s a lot of “Sally-A and Sally-1” or “Amelie-Yin and Amelie-Yang” kinds of naming schemes going.

Some Shadows become overtly hostile, stepping up the intensity of their assault and corruption -- though this will usually come with the desire to protect the magical girl because “nobody is allowed to defeat you but me”. With manic cackles, they try to crush what they see as weakness in the other, the weakness in themselves. And their magical girls are iron-hearted in their resolve to vanquish their Shadow, vanquish everything evil and impure within themselves -- and remember, they can indeed succeed at this. And even though they will fall to impurity after it happens, they will know that’s still a win in their column, and they won’t let their counterpart forget how much they sucked no matter what role they are currently in. .

And honestly, while the urge to corrupt the magical girl is the most important drive that animates the Shadow, she doesn’t have to be obsessive about it. Sometimes, especially with magical girls who are less active, the Shadow gets her own life with her own friends and goals and keys, and only strikes at her counterpart in infrequent but precise assaults.

No matter how hostile, and no matter how many ways this relationship is expressed, no Shadow and magical girl can truly hate each other. They are parts of the same whole, and that doesn’t just mean they are close, that’s how they address their goals. A magical girl who is overtly assaulted by her Shadow is fundamentally someone excited by that, who wants to use those assaults to figure out who she is.

**Magical Methods And Shadow Counters**

Any member of any race other than Succubi can become a magical girl. Even males, though it’s rare. Often, but not always, the corruption cycle of a magical boy centers around feminization and accepting or rejecting femininity. Anyway, yeah, almost everyone can get in on it.

The Shadow, the part of the self the magical girl denies, always has some sexual element to it, but even though the most common form is a general denial of sexuality it’s not the only one. Humans, Wood Elves, Goblins, Titans, all of those people can deny their sexual desires in an attempt to attain purity. But Orcs are all about honesty and trying to pretend they have no sexuality is just incomprehensible. Bunnies are usually fucking whenever they forget they aren’t fucking. A Dark Elf will begin her career as a magical girl when she is just about to bear her mother a child and serve as her bondage sex slave. But there is still something they fear and long for, embrace and deny.

The most common “alternative” corruption is a suppression of dominance or submission. I am a Good Girl, I do not seek to be aggressive, I accept the sexual role others assign to me _I want to whip my tits out and dare them not to stare I want to push her onto that table and make her scream I want I want I want_. I am a mighty champion, powerful and confident, I will never bow to the power of another _grab me by the throat and tell me I’ve been bad and I need to be punished and then take me claim me use me_.

But they can go more esoteric, more specific. I am a super helpful Bunny who cares for her sisters, so it would be super lame to masturbate for parthenogenesis, I totally gotta breed with a whole bunch of partners so all of us can be healthier and luckier _I am totally the sexiest most gorgeous creature in the world and like only myself can please myself so I want my pussy to go so super super wild at my expert hands my belly starts to swell up on its own I really really wanna feel myself blowing my fertile load in my cunt and making myself a total Bunny breeder bitch ‘cause like I’m the only one who deserves to all of you gotta look look look but you don’t get to touch nuh uh you don’t deserve it._

I am an obedient Dark Elf who devoutly follows the Sacred Count, I am a vessel for my mother’s desires, her children, and her love, and my desires are subordinate to hers _I am a horny bitch who needs to jerk off every waking moment until I’m covered in my own cream and don’t care what I was ordered to do I will flip the Sacred Count around and have my mother on her knees begging to serve me_. 

I am an Orc, mighty and proud, I do not hide or deny my desires, I will exert my sexual will on those around me and so shall they, and thus all will know the truth expressed through conflict _I am secret I am hidden desires I do not know them but they are there extending and usurping in my mind I have no idea where they come from but I will surrender to them and I will be led in my twisted desire by these dark urges oh they are so dark and forbidden and primal and unknowable and forbidden and the truth means nothing next to my pleasure_. 

There’s options.

The Shadow also has options in how to assault the magical girl’s purity. While a magical girl has flashy, overwhelming powers to vanquish evil with, the ability to protect and heal, and the power to inspire hope and courage both magical and mundane, the Shadow’s suite of powers are much weaker and more subtle, focused on manipulation and influence. Minor illusions, make certain things appear as they are not. Darkness. Sapping away life energy from the unaware. The ability to hold an opponent still long enough to escape, or to teleport to your lair when things go bad. When an enemy is weaker than them, and could be defeated without much trouble, they appear to have such overwhelming force they simply obliterate any resistance. Shadows do not summon their own Foul beasts, nor can they banish them, but when they know when the beasts will arise they can command their loyalty and aim their mindless lusts to more productive (and less damaging) ends. Generally, a place that has a recurring Foul problem will produce about one tainted beast or full-on monster per week during the course of one season. 

Foul magics that animate these creatures need to be supported by draining the living energy of sapient beings, and a Shadow can ensure this is done in a sustainable way, with energy being drained by indirect means instead of just attacking and grabbing people. Thanks to the influence of Shadows being passed down into eldritch occult lore, the energy harvest no longer takes the form of violent assault, but circuitous schemes. So they will do things like set up a fortune-teller’s stall, and “predict” a ruinous fate for someone with a lot of energy, marking them for later, and then go to their house in the middle of the night and drain them so everyone thinks “oh whoa this fortune teller is so accurate!” Or they will sell ice cream that drains your energy when you get an ice cream headache. Give out flowers that will, you guessed it, drain your energy when placed as part of a floral arrangement. You know. General overcomplicated dickery.

Of course, the magical girl’s magic is uniquely effective against the Foul, making her the best means of fighting these tainted creatures, but so too is it uniquely ineffective against her Shadow. While her Shadow’s weak magic is uniquely powerful against the magical girl, and grows further in power as she is corrupted and tempted.

The Shadow does learn hidden techniques to influence the thoughts of others, but like all such spells, they are weak and some are extremely finicky. A Shadow can attempt to convince others that something is not unusual or worthy of notice, she can stoke feelings and sensations and make them more vivid, and she can telepathically insert messages into their inner monologue. But of course they have no compulsion to obey or accept these messages, and if the message is not in line with their ordinary mind they just dismiss it as an intrusive thought, the way you might suddenly have the unwanted thought “I could break this stained glass and nobody would stop me.” Almost always, what the Shadow influences others to do must be something in line with their personality that they might have just done anyway. Her methods of subtle control (and ability to fake doing bigger things) allow her to fit perfectly into the role of the Villainous Mastermind.

Remember though, a Shadow’s powers are magnified against her magical girl, opening up some powerful abilities as the girl is further corrupted. Send her vivid, lustful dreams. Instead of a single fleeting thought, implant a nagging idea in the back of her mind, not overwhelming, not a compulsion, but something that will keep coming up. Magnify her sensitivity, or intensify an emotion whenever the girl feels it and not just when the Shadow actively uses the spell. Make the magical girl fail to notice things or remember basic concepts, fiddling with her “common sense” of what’s normal and what isn’t. Or make her more likely to notice, remember, or fixate on certain sights, like heaving breasts on the grateful women she rescues. True mind control is functionally impossible, and the substitute is only possible when a girl is near full corruption: cascading her body with pleasure when she submits to desire, and filling her with revulsion at the thought of resisting. All these things can still be resisted, of course, with great self-control and willpower and focus on the truly important pure things in the girl’s life. And sometimes they are resisted, and this staggering resolve and power of friendship shatter everything the Shadow believes about power and open her heart to the Power of Friendship. But they usually aren’t resisted.

So there are many methods the Shadow uses to employ these powers. Some Shadows stick with the same type of plan and refine it over multiple cycles because it meshes with who they are, and some mix it up as they learn more about themselves and their counterpart. Take control of the local beasts if they have no leader, but if they do have a Foul sorcerer in charge, make an “ally” of her and use your superior knowledge to guide (and minimize) her evil deeds until she invariably Outlives Her Usefulness. Confront the magical girl with seductive sex, assail her with sexual monsters, give her more and more opportunities to succumb of her own accord, haunt her dreams, place her into compromising situations… The important thing to note is that this is a process. You can’t just tentacle-fuck a magical girl once and she goes “oh no, now I’m lewd”. Just like for the Succubi their magic is derived from, corruption is a process of breaking down resistance and abandoning an old view of the world. Whatever sexual encounters or visions or experience magical girls have, they will still vow to remain pure, to do better and live up to the Power of Friendship, and not let the pleasure they experienced overwhelm them. But each time, of course, they will be slightly less sure of their virtue, their ability to hold, their desire to not succumb in the first place. That’s the corruption. Not having sex, not feeling pleasure, but forgetting why you were resisting it. Forgetting why you denied what you wanted. Forgetting why you didn’t know what you wanted.

**Magical Idols: Magical Girls And The World**

Most stories of magical girls are dismissed as urban legends, the way most people pretend the Foul isn’t a problem. Oh, sure, magical girls are a concept in the public consciousness. But so are superheroes, and they’re just fictional things everyone knows about. Obviously, some people have a fetish for pretending to be degraded magical girls, and whatever, you do you. (And to be fair, most people who say they are magical girls who need to be fucked silly because they are hopelessly lewd ARE, in fact, fetishists with no special powers or Shadow.)

There are a few magical girls in the public consciousness, serving more as mascots and celebrities than anything else. These “magical idols” are famous and much-beloved, often singers or some other kind of performers, and consider the task of uplifting people’s hearts with hope and courage to be crucial to fighting evil. Of course, there’s always rumors of weird sex things going around with these idols, but of course there is, they’re celebrities. People talk about how Magical Musical Melanie opened her coat at them and revealed she was wearing nothing but crotchless panties and a cupless bra, but if everyone who bragged about a sexual encounter with a celebrity was telling the truth celebrities would just have no time to do anything else. 

And yeah, every once in a while you notice them getting weirder and more sexual and thirsty, but it’s obvious that they’re worn out by their touring schedule and all the drugs they are probably taking. So they vanish unexpectedly every once in a while ,and then their manager says it’s “heat exhaustion” and then like a week to a month later she’s back and totally fine and innocent and pure and happy again. Perfectly explainable. There’s obviously no such thing as actual magical girls! That’s just silly and too unironic!

Even among people in the know about magical girls, Shadows are very secret. For pretty obvious reasons, magical girls don’t want to go blabbing about their Shadows to just anyone, because one: it’s shameful and dirty to acknowledge that separated part of herself and two: it will mess up their working relationship and get in the way of the Shadow being able to take a position of dominance over the other evil forces and redirect them to less harmful acts. Since a Shadow can perfectly imitate her magical girl, she can help keep up the masquerade when the girl needs her to. Of course, when posing as her magical girl she will be lewder and make some sexual problems and promises the girl will have to deal with later, but hey, nobody’s going to get made or found out or anything, it’s not going to be more than she can handle. And secondary villains the Shadow assumes control of don’t necessarily know the Shadow is the magical girl’s counterpart -- they can just look like someone else and often assume a separate evil queen identity -- and even if they DO, they don’t know how linked and cyclical the relationship is. 

So, working in secret, maintaining a normal mundane life and a secret identity as a foe of evil, the magical girl goes through her journey, embodying her purity and corruption in turns. But you can’t be a magical girl forever. It is a process of learning, learning your own limits and desires and fears, and growing to accept them or change them. Each time you fall, you more accurately determine where the line is for you. And when this process is complete and you truly know yourself and have reconciled the two halves of your identity, well, you and your Shadow are the same being again. No more counterpart, no more dichotomy, just a single well-balanced individual who knows who she is deeply and is at peace with every part of her personality. Some magical girls take longer than others to get there, of course, but it’s the end state. Once you are at peace with yourself and your journey of self-discovery is complete and the magical girl and the Shadow are the same being, it’s time to retire.

Retired magical girls retain the magical abilities they had as either half, but they’re much weaker, as the deficits in character they required to power up aren’t there any more. Their loved ones may know some fuzzy details about their “previous job”, or that they used to be two individuals, but they don’t have to have every bit spelled out for them, because they aren’t on the job any more. They do have great wisdom and experience, perfectly poised to guide the new batch of magical girls chosen by those cute familiars. Sure, sometimes when there’s a great threat to the world it’s time to call the previous generation in to aid the current, to employ their honed skills and hybrid magics. But mostly you’re going to be providing maternal advice to the new crop of magical girls, showing them the ropes, teaching them the tips and tricks necessary to be heroic champions of righteousness and purity.

And helping out their Shadows, of course. You’re both the magical girl and the Shadow, remember? You know how important her role is, and how much fun she can be to play with. Maybe you’ll come out of retirement to be the evil empress secretly behind this new group of Shadows all along. Just for old time’s sake.

* * *

_“Dark Tourmaline!” the girl exclaims, shocked. “How did you find my home?”_

_“Calm down,” Tourmaline says, “this isn’t a business call. Black Siren has been getting too big for her britches lately. Next time you fight, say ‘it’s over for you!’, and I’ll dispel all her protection so you can kick her ass. Be sure to make a dramatic show of it.” Then, Tourmaline grinned. “She’ll be totally helpless… I bet she’d really mellow out if you made her into a mommy.”_

_The girl narrows her eyes even as she chews her lip._

_“Or, just defeat her! Up to you.”_

* * *

_“I’m ssshhorry, Raspberry,” the girl in green says, moans, drools. “But it feelssshh ssshhoooo good… I jussshht couldn’t help myssshhelf…”_

_The girl in red takes a wary step back from her friend, from the two dominatrices who had her leash. “Mint, you need help. This isn’t you…”_

_“Oh, but it is!,” cackles the red villainess. “She has found her true self… and so will you, Raspberry!” She lets Mint loose, to leap and kiss and grope her partner._

_“And she ‘found her true self’ in less than half the time I held out,” the green villainess whispers with a smirk._

* * *

_“Mmph. Mmph!” Teodora-South moans in pleasure. “It’s so tender!” she says, mouth full of rare hamburger. “You think vampires really eat these?”_

_“It is a ‘blood burger’,” says Teodora-North, “but can they even get the meat, like, in their fangs?” Brazenly, shamelessly, she steals some Bayeaux fries off of South’s platter._

_South wipes a bit of burger juice from her lips. “Well, we got an hour until the movie. Wanna just hang out here?”_

_North looks a bit sly. “You know… I hear the bathroom here has a glory hole. Maybe we could… Eh? Eh?”_

_South rolls her eyes. “Come on, not this. We were having such a lovely day.”_

_“I know! I know!” North protests. “I just meant, like, you and me. I just wanted to know what it felt like. Totally respectful of your boundaries, because sex with me doesn’t count, right? It’s just a bit of masturbation. C’mon. Please?”_

_South gives her a harsh, appraising look that melts into indecision. “Well… You did buy the tickets… and I suppose it’s okay to do you a favor… But just you, okay! No tricks!”_

_North was going to send in that nice futa waitress, but South is right. They are having such a lovely day. There’d be other days for South to learn the joy of sucking off strangers in a bathroom like the slut she was, but right now, South doing a favor for a friend is fine too._

**Magical Girl Characters**

Magical girls have typical “normal” names for whatever culture they hail from. Their names in their secret magical warrior identities are god damn ridiculous, the kind of overstuffed overdramatic nonsense that can only be invented by someone who has just put all of her sense of ironic detachment into another separate being.

Any magical girl character, of course, is really two characters: the girl and the Shadow. There are many factors you need to consider and have the opportunity to play with. How close are they? What is their relationship like? What is the desire your magical girl is denying herself? 

Unlike other races and cultures, a magical girl’s life story is always centrally the same one. But also, they have more ways than anyone to carry out that story. It’s even harder than usual to describe the typical role one takes in a group or larger tale. Despite being magical warriors, the most obvious role for a magical girl in a mixed group is to emphasize the “magical” part over the “warrior” part, and be a magic specialist and sage. But her Shadow is just as much a character, and the Shadow’s skill set more suits her to being a sneaky rogue underworld type. 

A magical girl will obviously go out with a party of adventurers to fight roaming evils in the world, spread chaste love and the Power of Friendship, and learn new things in her quest to defeat the Foul. But the magical girl doesn’t have to be the ‘main character’ at all. A Shadow could be going out to learn better, lewder methods of corruption to assail her magical girl with. Or if the magical girl is out on an adventure, of course the Shadow would want to have her own adventure group following along, so she can always be close by to tempt and corrupt.

But, of course, one of the most interesting aspects of the magical girl is her working relationship with her Shadow. If one of them has a reason to go on an adventure, well, since the other one is also her then she has just as good a reason. And the Shadow needs to make sure her magical girl is safe enough to be corrupted, right? So it’s more likely than not that both halves of the magical girl join the same adventuring party. The whole group’s dynamics will not center on them, but you DO need to figure out how the magical girl/Shadow relationship plays into the group dynamic. However lewd the group is, the magical girl considers that the “baseline” level of sexuality that is okay, but anything further is impure and wants to stop it. The group will know that line, and say “hey, let’s keep it at an R rating for our friend here”, at least at first. For the Shadow wants that level of lewdness to go up to seduce the magical girl with pleasures of the flesh… but not too fast, or it’ll scare her off. Step it up, piece by piece, subtly enough that she questions if this wasn’t the standard all along. Give her glimpses of what goes on behind her back. Opportunities to explore it. Slowly heating up the temptation.

Or the party may take sides. Some supporting the Shadow and some the magical girl, or some supporting Girl-A and some supporting Girl-1. It’s like a friendly sporting rivalry. Or an office betting pool. If you do make a betting pool, you need to make it asymmetrical to reflect the fact that corruption usually wins, so supporters of the Shadow need to pay much more into the pool than supporters of the magical girl. Like Elaine in The Contest. Ten to one ratio is a good starting place.

A magical girl is equally suited to a position of leadership or subordination, whether a noble figurehead of justice to rally behind or a faithful and devoted and very genki servant. So is a Shadow, working as the sinister puppeteer or the sinister minion spreading her corruption from below. (The exception is that the magical girl never takes orders from the Shadow unless they’re in immediate danger, because then she just isn’t resisting the Shadow. If a magical girl is in a group led by a Shadow, she will probably be more of an independent party outside the chain of command who happens to follow the Shadow’s group around.) They will still likely respect each other’s competence and skill, and perhaps keep a healthy but cordial distance that allows them to work together to common goals. If they are close friends, the magical girl probably regards her Shadow’s perverse attempts to corrupt her with something like a hands-on-hips “Oh, _you_!” and a pause for the laugh track

Magical girls and Shadows make good matches for any other character that wants a “supporting character”, like a vampire thrall or a Titan’s pit crew or even a Dark Elf’s daughter-slave. (If you are pregnant before becoming a magical girl, both halves are pregnant and they temporarily re-merge to give birth. Don’t worry about that.) Your relationship with your patron will be part of the corruption dynamic, with that relationship getting more degraded and depraved as the Shadow influences it, or perhaps a subordinate Shadow subtly influences her patron to corrupt the magical girl.

But these are all just suggestions and rough guidelines. Worst enemy, best friend, worstbest frenemy, the Shadow is the central dramatic metaphor for the magical girl’s coming of age and personal growth, so you should make sure it’s as unique as she is.


	10. Better Living Through Chemicals: The Goblin Guilds

_(content warning: shortstacks, transformation, drug use, gender chicanery, the hustle, I got way too into describing the history, reifying the jersey italian / scottish twitter binary, the 11th amendment states that james brown is acknowledged as the godfather of soul)_

Most everyone has met a goblin. Trade expeditions put them in nearly every major hub of commerce in the world, where they flourished. Goblins are proud, outgoing, and clever, and they can adapt and thrive in pretty much any sort of context -- but tend to be gloriously unsubtle about it.

Goblins are most famous for their alchemy, creating tinctures and tonics to cure disease, to change the body, or to get you high as _fuck_. And they have a reputation as great merchants, because they will sell this stuff to you at the best prices anywhere! You want concoctions, buddy, you got ‘em! It’s not like every goblin you ever meet is out here making trades… but every single one of them DOES know someone you should take your business to should you be so inclined.

Why so focused on trade? Why all the alchemy? Because goblins believe in freedom above all. They cast off the chains of their former masters, and ensured they would never be held back again -- and they believe everyone deserves the same gift. Trade means you don’t have to be inhibited by what you have, because you can swap it for what you want. You don’t have to listen to anyone telling you how you have to live your life because you always have the right to get out there and try to buy your own way with your own work. And alchemy is the ultimate freedom, from the ultimate jailer. Did you ask for your DNA to be this way? Did you consent to your species, your gender, your eye color, your weight? Hell no! Why should you be satisfied with the hand biology dealt you? You didn’t even know you were playing! You have the right as a free being to decide what you want your body to be and how you want your body to work. Selling drugs and potions and transformatives isn’t just a way to make money, it’s a moral duty to allow other peoples to indulge the freedom of self that is the right of all sentient beings.

But it is also a way to make money, of course, and goblins gotta respect the hustle.

**Goblin Physiology**

Goblins are naturally short humanoids -- topping out at 3-4 feet, or “short stack” classification -- with pointed ears, greenish skin, and stocky builds. Usually, anyway. There are two major ethnic groups of goblins: the dense-urban mountain goblins with paler green skin who speak with an accent much like Altian despite being on opposite ends of the world, and the light-urban bog goblins with a darker green skin who speak with a more highlandish accent. There are innumerable other minor “ethnicities”.

Goblins are incredibly vulnerable to magic, and their ability to use intentional magic can only be measured in laboratory settings. To offset this, goblins wear osmium jewelry or have osmium flecks embedded in their skin. While it would appear to be a downside, goblins have turned their magic vulnerability into their greatest strength: alchemy is chemistry that is expressed by principles of magic, and therefore goblins get vastly increased efficacy from alchemical treatments, and making alchemical concoctions doesn’t rely on their shitty magic affinity. 

That’s why the description of goblins only applies “usually”, and why there’s an innumerable number of ethnicities. Thanks to the miracle of alchemy, a goblin’s body is what a goblin wants it to be. Some of them invent new ethnicities and new genders because they’re bored. You wanna be taller, smaller, wider, skinnier, have a tentacle, have some fur, get six sets of breasts? Done. Be who you are inside no matter how weird it is. Dysphoria? There’s a potion for that.

**Goblin History I: The Lizardmen Fuck Around With The Goblins**

Goblins got their start beneath the mountain of Cruth-Arrtharachad in the Itedona range, looming above the Searbhag bogs. And by “got their start”, they mean “were enslaved”. They have no history before they were enslaved by the vicious and cruel lizardmen -- they were forbidden from learning to read or write and surviving lizardman records are mostly about troop movements and logistics. They may have been an engineered slave race, or may have just been unfortunate, but the lizardmen used them as tools. Weapons.

Lizardmen were fucking assholes. Their leadership allied with the Foul, who gave them dark magics and minions so long as their wars were perpetual and pointless. And they were. Lizardmen adored violence and bloodshed for its own sake, and any who didn’t, well, they didn’t last very long. (Some theorize they were turned into goblins by the warlock-chieftains and that’s where goblins came from, but it’s not a popular theory.) 

Lizardmen were incredibly magically adept, and nearly immune to magic themselves. Goblins were malleable, almost uniquely vulnerable to magic, and almost incapable of using it themselves. The lizardman warlocks used this extensively. Goblins were all futanari, made to reproduce prodigiously and mature rapidly, to always have disposable troops for the front line. At any moment a goblin could be made to mutate into a massive, frenzied brute called a hobgoblin, lashing out at anything around it. Or she could be detonated like an organic bomb, if she was close enough to something a lizardman wanted destroyed. Or have her face rearranged if the lizardman didn’t like it, and then the lizardman would probably set her on fire because fuck you that’s why.

Goblins were made to fight and die to claim or defend lands for the lizardmen, but they didn’t get to live in it. They had to live in the cramped warrens of Cruth-Arrtharachad and for their farmland and food they had to live in the noxious Searbhag bogs nearby. Bogs don’t have a whole lot of things to recommend them. Not a lot of farmland or game animals or space to build a home. The lizardmen didn’t care. Just spouts of flame, pools of acid, rotting masses of peat, and rodents of unusual size, that was all the goblins would have.

Oh, and weird swamp fruit. Swamp fruit that the goblins discovered could be distilled and fermented into alcohol, and that made you forget all your troubles! Goblins got a lot less rebellious after the discovery of fermentation. The lizardmen spread this intoxicant to their slaves, to pacify them. Indeed, the goblins became a lot more well-behaved. They forgot all about trying to rise up. They only cared about developing new types of booze, new ways to get trashed. Spreading the latest and greatest liquor back to the mountain warrens and across the lands. They developed a way of recording what made up the booze, which was technically a written language, but was clearly harmless shapes and sticks, and lots of hexagons with sticks poking off of them. It kept the goblins in line.

The goblins started to shape up and be ideal servants to the lizardmen who kept them so shitfaced. The lizardmen had lots of scavenged ancient war engines, ones they couldn’t magically maintain. But look, this liquid derived from rotten peat can serve as a fuel for them! We clearly cannot operate the machines, we don’t have the magic required, but we can maintain them with our small hands. We ask only that the most useless machines be repurposed to drill more tunnels in the mountain, to hold more warrens and have more routes for booze to flow in!

There was a major campaign going on against the Dark Elves. You don’t actually fight over a Dark Elf city; you have an army that can take it, and then bad things happen to them on the way to the city, and if you still have an army by the time you arrive you find a ghost town loaded with booby traps. Lizardmen are too valuable to trigger booby traps! Let the goblins do it, and only promise that they get to keep any alcohol they find. As the campaign went on, the lizardmen noticed the goblins were recovering much less gold and platinum from the cities they looted, but it must have been due to the Dark Elves securing their resources better. The goblins have nothing they could do with gold and platinum, and they only carried out that bitter, burning liquor they call “aqua regia” anyway!

Dark Elves do not look at the stars if they can help it, but mathematically track and derive their positions anyway, as if they were very dangerous things they need to know the locations of. Records recovered by the goblins, obediently returned to their masters, showed that there was a comet coming soon, the “Eyebrow of Terror”, would astrologically portend the most advantageous time to counterattack. The Dark Elves would certainly attack at that point, and the lizardmen discovered fragments of attack plans for the fateful night. All forces would be on high alert, entrenched in defensive positions, forces deployed at maximum readiness, ready to decapitate the most elite Dark Elf forces and leave their kingdoms defenseless.

The portended night came. The Eyebrow of Terror slid along the sky. The land was quiet. No sign of the attacking army, but they would be sneaky, wouldn’t they? A clear, dark night, with only the sounds of crickets.

And then the ground shook. The air roared. The sky turned the deep orange of autumn sunset. Everything burst into flames. everything is on fire and there’s a three-foot green bitch in pigtails on the watch tower with an explosive glass bottle in each hand, heaving them left and right while screaming “AYE, TIS PAYBACK TIME YE SCALY FUCKS! THEY AIN’T YET MADE THE GLUE THAT’LL PUT YE BANGER-TONGUED WANKSTAINS BACK TOGETHER!”

And beneath her, another goblin snorts a fistful of white powder and her musculature explodes out of her burlap clothing and she bellows “HEY, YO, COME BACK OUT AND FINISH WHAT YA DONE STARTED YA DUMB FUCKIN’ PAZOLIS!”

It was time to get back. Payback. The Big Payback. 

[The Big Payback!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncvBBjb3iU4)

**Goblin History II: The Lizardmen Find Out What Happens When You Fuck Around With The Goblins**

Just like every other race who discovered agriculture, the first thing the goblins did was ferment plants into alcohol. The second was to distill it into _aqua vitae_ , the water of life. A substance that didn’t just let you forget your problems, it seemed to distill and purify things in ways the lizardmen had no idea about.

Not a lot of livable land in the bogs. Not a lot of game animals. But it does have its own bounty to offer: Organic fuels from decaying peat. Pools of acid and alkaline (an alkaline swamp is technically a “fen”). Geysers ready to spurt flame. Unusual plant life with strange venoms.

Chemicals. Lots of chemicals.

And when you used the _aqua vitae_ to purify these weird swamp chemicals, they started to do some interesting things. Fun things. Powerful things. A power the lizardmen didn’t understand and didn’t know they had to guard against. A power the goblins would study under their very snouts.

Aqua vitae and a scrap of looted platinum turns hartshorn into aqua fortis. Aqua vitae in the stomach of a dead rodent purifies the vitriol into acidum salis. Acidum salis plus aqua fortis makes aqua regia. Aqua regia dissolves gold and platinum so they can be smuggled out undetected. Dissolved platinum reveals flecks of osmium, the magic-proof metal. Adding more hartshorn back to the precipitate of gold extracted from aqua regia makes it fulminating gold. Which _fucking explodes_ when you so much as look at it funny.

With secret codes and secret handshakes, chemical reagents were smuggled alongside shipments of booze. In the dark tunnels of the mountain warrens, goblin broodmothers experimented with these reagents, determining their properties and chemical makeup. They devised a system of recording chemical structures to pass around knowledge, to encode messages in their underground network. It became the basis of their entire written language. 

With no colleges, no scholars, no symposia, goblins independently derived the most complete understanding of alchemy and chemistry any society had ever attained. In secret, in guttering candlelight, under the power of hostile slavers. In a cave. With a box of scraps.

Chemistry is the study of how the physical properties of individual substances interact. Alchemy is the study of how physical properties of individual substances create and express magical fields. Alchemy can bottle flame, brew glory, or put a stopper on death -- temporarily. Goblins are really bad at magic. But alchemy, well, that’s not a spell they are casting, is it? That activates off of the chemical energy from the reagents themselves. It’s better when you have no magic, so your own magic isn’t mucking with the chemical process. And they’re super vulnerable to magic, right? Which means an alchemical treatment that makes you stronger and faster, well, a lizardman could drink it and think it was useless, but a goblin could drink it and it’d make them _way_ stronger and _way_ faster.

These ancient machines, these engines of war, they need magic to operate as designed. We can’t use them for shit. But that’s the thing though, “as designed”. If you rip out the entire control apparatus and replace it with a manual transmission, it’s going to be jerky as all fuck and it’s going to need new weapon mounts but it’s going to work. That drill we used to expand the warren, oh, that can dig up into a fortified city and pop out and start shooting rockets everywhere. And we’ll paint a shark mouth on the drill bit because fuck you.

Attaining the knowledge required to do all this, establishing the underground network to coordinate it, that would take a long time. Entire generations would live and die, toiling in secret for rewards they would never see. Each of them driven on by that single idea: that because of their efforts, their descendants would be free. Their descendants would get back. Payback. The Big Payback.

Funny thing about defensive positions: the better they are at defending from an outside attack, the worse they tend to be at defending against attacks from within. It’s hard to get away, and in the confusion of battle, you don’t know who is attacking and you’re liable to do the opposite of what you should be doing. So they needed to make sure as many lizardmen as possible were on full alert with all their troops and materiel ready. They found astronomical charts, and spread the word that the coming of the comet, the Eyebrow of Terror, would be their synchronized time to strike. It was real, that was what it was called, but everything about it being the astrological time to strike was made up. They couldn’t convincingly fake Dark Elf writing, but they didn’t need to. They knew Dark Elf infiltrators -- Dark Elves with stolen forms or paid-off agents -- were in the lizardmen ranks. Once the goblins floated the idea that this was happening, the infiltrators assumed “Oh, I know this isn’t true at all, so this must be the operation we’re supposed to be doing to destabilize the lizardmen. I’ll forge up some supporting texts and fake battle plans.”

The goblins even played the Dark Elves, because nobody realized what clever little bastards they were. The lizardmen had long thought their slaves were dull-witted mendicants, because they were so awful at magic. They were about to learn how wrong they were. Goblins all over had materials in place and knowledge to use them and an appointed time to bring them out. My sister get ready, that’s a fact. Get ready you mothers, for the Big Payback. 

The Big Payback was the single most beautiful, most triumphant event in goblin history. Maybe in anybody’s history. A heart-rending symphony of explosive carnage. The perpetual sunset from all the fires smelled like blood and ashes and chlorine and victory. When a goblin warrior’s “kick powder” wore off and she slipped into a coma, her sisters were there to catch her, tend to her, and send someone else to snort a handful and pick up her work. Lizardman command structure was decapitated in seconds and nobody knew what was going on or what they needed to do or where they needed to deploy or what to do about having a coked-up goblin with rocks for skin tearing out your spine and choking you out with it. The lizardmen cities were invaded from beneath and shattered. After the first attack, it was a week before the goblins conclusively had driven them out of their core territories. 

(The lizardmen were not exterminated. The goblins didn’t bother chasing them. The lizardmen regrouped in the mountains far from their stronghold, to ready a counterattack, and then by _sheer coincidence_ a whole bunch of very unfortunate things happened to them before they could become a military threat. Very tragic.)

All the planning, the scheming, the waiting, paid off in a moment of catharsis felt by the entire race. The goblins were free and would never, ever again be forced to live like their forebears had. Nowadays people think that goblins have no sense of subtlety, but that’s not true. They just know their ancestors struggled and hid and schemed and died so that their progeny wouldn’t HAVE to be subtle ever again.

**Goblin History III: Freedom Isn’t Free But There Are Installment Plans**

Okay, so, first order of business with the new goblin lands. Crazy victory orgy. Everyone just fucks everyone inside out. On every surface in every building. No, no, right on the blasted rubble, that makes it hotter. Get the lizardmen out of -- oh, hey, you’re actually a polymorphed Dark Elf spy! Awesome, couldn’t have done it without ya! Congratulations, ya tall drink of water, you get six shortstacks of goblin gratitude all over you before we make you put your clothes back on and fuck off.

Second order of business. Get utterly shitfaced on aqua vitae. They were exaggerating their love for booze to trick the lizardmen, they weren’t lying about it altogether. Everyone who knew any significant portion of the plan for the Big Payback wasn’t allowed to get more than a bit tipsy, for fear they might reveal something in a drunken stupor. So THEY had a shitload of drinking to catch up on. It was a good thing they’d been so thorough in destroying lizardman command, because if the lizardmen immediately counterattacked then they’d find every “officer” of the goblin resistance effort passed out in a puddle of their own alcoholic puke. It was a hell of a party, is what I’m saying. The offensive lasted a week -- the victory fireworks, technically, still haven’t stopped.

Third order of business, set up new digs. Take over the lizardman capital of Slanan-ak-Atahl and draw dicks everywhere. Everywhere. Nobody tear down or restore any of their buildings -- build on top of them, make scavenged additions to each building, so it’s clear that we blew their shit up and then built on top of it. Rename it “Lizardmen Are Bitches Town”. Speaking of renaming, lizardmen didn’t let us have surnames because it gave us a sense of commonality. So everyone get together with your families and decide on what your surnames are gonna be! The less subtle the better!

Now, start enjoyin’ that newfound freedom. Because hey, when you think about it, lizardmen sculpted their forms and shit, right? So why shouldn’t they have the freedom to change that? All sorts of alchemical formulae that had been abandoned partway through research because they had no obvious military application got dusted off and experimented with. Anything that changed you was fair game. 

If this powder makes you trip balls and see purple elephants everywhere, well, that’s your right because lizardmen dinnae want you to see them! Aye, what’s this ye call “gender”? Ne’er heard of it! Ah, but look at this, nae I quaff a pint and I’m what ye call a “boy!” All prancin’ about with me baws danglin’ out the window! Aye, and what if I don’t want to be a bog goblin today? Freebase a wee bit here and I’m a snow goblin I am, all blue and fuzzy and ready to frolic and parade! ...Is it warm nae or is it just me?

It was about this time that leadership began to form. The first Goblin Queen, Queen Sammi “The Queen” Lizardstomper, was crowned, and then a rich goblin tradition was formed by everyone ignoring everything she said. Real power seemed to be coalescing behind two figures: Nicoletta “Big Mama” Geargrinder, head broodmother of the mountain goblins, and Moira “Witchcraft” Detonator, rockstar alchemist of the swamp goblins. They and their backers would form the Maternal Order of Engineers and the Explosive Alchemist Society (respectively), the two major guilds and power blocs in goblin society to this day.

And right away they had to deal with a crisis. Their population was about to skyrocket (it was one HELL of a party), and they didn’t nearly have the food reserves to deal with a 60% spike in mouths to feed. And the lizardmen made the goblins farm, but they extensively used magic to make crops grow, probably so the goblins would be dependent on them. All their alchemy so far had focused on mammals, they didn’t have, like, potions of Miracle-Gro. They had a bunch of food stores meant for the lizardmen, they could use stasis draughts to prevent food stores from rotting (or tasting any good), but even expanding their bog farming operations they had maybe three, three and a half years before mass famine. Less, if the Dark Elves started fucking with them, which they were going to. And there was no way they could invade other lands for food, the lizardman way of war was unthinkable and they didn’t know how to use their own ways of war to actually attack external territory.

They were going to need to trade for things. They would need a lot of money for food. In their completely landlocked territory that everyone avoided and nobody had good relations with.

Pause for an appropriate time while you hear massive explosions and drill tanks working in the distance.

**Goblin History IV: They Do Wheelin’ They Do Dealin’**

Welcome, friends! You’ll now find the Emasungai River, the aorta of trade in Etrangia, will now conveniently pass through Lizardmen Are Bitches Town, your one-stop shop for all your civilization’s needs! We offer boat repairs! Concoctions! You sick of lugging around all that lantern oil, you want some efficient and earthy-smelling peatoline gas, you got it, champ! You feelin’ lonely out there on your barge? We got goblin hookers of every color and genital configuration, and because you’re such nice customers, you know what, goblin hooker is half your size so she’s half the price! You got animals? Animals full of delicious meats, but also weird organs and snouts and hooves you just throw out? We’ll buy that junk! That’s right, we buy snouts! Irregular grains, mooshy fruit, we offer the best deals anywhere to take that off your hands!

Concoctions! Boy, ya want concoctions, ya gottem! I got a healing potion here, you shotgun it and it’s like you rested for two days straight! Unhappy with the size of your breasts? One of these bad boys every week and bazinga, now you got bazongas! Unhappy with that gender thing you tall folks are always on about? We got a salve that will fix that right up for you! Unhappy with your performance in bed? Take a sniff of this and get all that passion back. If ya get an erection lasting more than four hours, ya welcome! Unhappy with the humanoid condition? We got uppers, downers, backers, sidewaysers, ya take two of these and ya see the machine elves that underlie reality! Take five and ya get into a screaming match with them about sportball teams!

You don’t like how you gotta keep taking the alchemicals to keep them working? Ma’am, I can tell you are a Dwarf of discerning taste and I respect that. Right this way, right this way, don’t mind the grease, we got solutions of a more durable nature. I notice that unfortunate missing arm your friend has, too much for healing magic? How about we fix you up with this badass robot arm, comes with a gyroscope, slingshot, and anything else we felt like fitting in there! Are you tired of having to scrub the floors of your palace or wherever it is that I assume Dwarves live? Are you going bankrupt on scullery maids? Have you ever thought “If only I could have jet propulsion on my mops”? Oh, troubles in the bedroom, eh? Looking for a long-term solution to that? We have this beauty right here, a 24-inch reciprocating mechanodong we like to call “The Rumbler”, and we guarantee everyone will leave your bed satisfied! Just for you, because I like you, I’ll waive the mandatory safety certification!

The traders of Etrangia were somewhat, let’s say, _miffed_ that their major river route was redirected through unfamiliar territory. More miffed at how the river started to get polluted with alchemical runoff. But on the other hand, man, those bargains were pretty crazy! 

Too crazy by half, really. The goblins had to cut prices to the bone to get people to accept the river redirect as a good thing and not, y’know, casus belli. Their margins were razor-thin, and nobody wanted to raise prices because they’d lose to everyone else. The Maternal Order of Engineers was supporting the traders and hustlers so they could take a cut and pay out to the bog goblins still working on crop research, but everyone needed to make sure they kept care of their own families before they started giving out to others. 

Tension was building as the Explosive Alchemist Society came up with failure after failure to find an alchemical super-fertilizer. They just had no idea how to work alchemy on plant life instead of mammals. Farms expanded as fast as they could but could only barely keep up with the population. Every goblin had to keep her eyes open for a hustle, some way to squeeze out a bit more money. They were importing crap-quality meats and grains and slathering them in grease to make them palatable, they were taking on piles of metallic junk and jury-rigging them into anything they thought might sell, they were taking in impure reagents of very questionable quality and using them to whip up wondrous potions that would probably work. Canals were dug to link more cities in the goblin lands, to pass through the chemical bogs and link up their infrastructure. They dipped into underground grottos for subterranean service for Dark Elf and Dwarf customers, and that was a pain in the ass. The water started to glow orange with alchemical runoff and waste. A bunch of really pissed-off druids made a bypass to the Emasungai, so now one fork would go on the old path and one would go to the toxic swamps and crazy bargains of the goblin lands, and THAT cut into profits. Then the same druids made the Explosive Alchemist Society set up a filtering dam where their spur rejoined the Emasungai to catch all their caustic concoctions, and THAT was expensive, but the alternative was having all the trees wake up and start smashing everything. 

The Goblin Markets gained a reputation as a place where you could find anything, and find it cheap, but it MIGHT blow up on you or turn you into a wild boar for a while. Also where every trader had a side hustle they wanted you to get in on, and you would be absolutely mobbed by hookers trying to get you to pay for a good time. They went on for a couple of generations like this, every single year of which looked like it was going to be the one with the devastating famine, but they always eked it out. Purely medical alchemy was always the biggest seller. Since other humanoids aren’t as alchemy-receptive as goblins, they needed to come back for regular doses of long-term alchemical treatments or else they’d wear off. So at least they had some guarantee of returning customers. But the Explosive Alchemist Society couldn’t get the magical fertilizer project going, and while they were coming up with new formulae in the process and some of them could have commercial applications, it wasn’t enough to seal the deal. And the failures were becoming humiliating. They all got ready for the Big Payback, how could they be so bad at adapting to this? Look, look at this! This latest project doesn’t just NOT do what we want, it did the opposite! Instead of increasing yield and fertility, a mammal who takes it is completely infertile while under its effects!

...And then the goblin’s money problems were solved.

**Goblin Prosperity**

Create a reliable method of birth control, and the world will beat a path to your door. The concoction was distributed free for goblins (they were seriously breeding way too fast), and trade canals overflowed with ships and barges of people trying to buy up pallets of infecunditatem salis, trade name Baby-No-Way or Breed-B-Gone. Now their razor-thin margin became a nice thick cushion, gave them plenty of space to work on things. Fix up infrastructure other than trade routes. Get actual food reserves. Kick out people who we knew were Dark Elf spies but who we had to let keep working anyway because we couldn’t spare the manpower.

Without the stress and constant shortages, the Explosive Alchemist Society allowed several independent research labs to spring up, one of whom devised an alchemical fertilizer inside of a couple years (the missing ingredient was pewter, for some reason). They could import pure alchemical reagents instead of the shady kind. They could finally have the freedom they deserved. 

Full freedom is freedom over your body. Use of recreational or “cosmetic” alchemy exploded. You wanna be stronger, you got it! Faster? Hardier? Quicker thinking? Better-smelling? Worse-smelling? Okay, look at the ups and downs of each treatment and decide what YOU want instead of accepting the hand DNA dealt you!

Any transformation you want, you go for it! Most Goblins stay generally Goblin-shaped, but if you want to go weirder, that is your right as a free being. Sick and tired of the old mountain goblin and bog goblin options? Make a new goblin! Be a snow goblin, a fire goblin, a night goblin, a nilbog, anything your heart desires! Gender? Make your own out of all kinds of modular components! Dicks, how many dicks you want, we go as high as you want! Wings? They won’t have much lift, but sure! Tentacles? Extra arms? Four centaur legs? It takes some time to get used to having any new limbs, your brain has to construct the wiring for them, but they’ll work! Wanna be a bimbo? Get some Bunny blood and you can be! Wanna be another race entirely? The treatment will wear off way faster than you are used to because you won’t have a goblin’s alchemical sensitivity but you can get at least a few days seeing how the other half lives! Wanna be a giant mass of eyeballs and bone wheels? Okay, but no refunds, wacko!

Freedom is also the ability to shape your environment. Fuck bogs, bogs don’t have rights! As free people, goblins get to make their land into whatever they want. Cruth-Arrtharachad is packed in with as many warrens as it can handle without collapsing and the Engineers just buy more mountains when they run out of space. The bogs and canals aren’t purified, aren’t clean at all, they glow in the way goblins want them to. Nature sucks, the land should do what they want -- there is not an acre in goblin territory that is natural and pristine, which is why their homeland is so beautiful. But it does mean that purifying dam is holding back a lot of ecological catastrophe from happening and like seven different nations are constantly inspecting it for danger.

So things were going pretty great for a long time. Did this mean that goblins stopped being so desperate to make deals and get hustles and perform business under the table? Hell no! The hustle doesn’t die and you gotta look out for you and yours. They still have a sense of goblin solidarity, but, well, there’s a saying: “Always get one over on your fellow goblin, but never go for two.” It means that you should always be looking for an advantage over your fellows, but once you have an advantage and only once you have it, go back to help your fellows instead of just making it bigger. We have access to pure reagents but if that’s too expensive for your needs, well, there’s always some contaminated stuff we can whip something out of for much cheaper. There may be side effects, but it’s your right to make an informed decision to risk them, ain’t it? You’re free, ain’t ya?

The Alchemists had power in goblin society for a long time (everyone still ignored the Queen), because alchemy was what the world turned to goblins for. Engineers did useful stuff in the goblin kingdom, they expanded warrens and ran farms and managed infrastructure and sold at retail, but there was never a huge quantum leap in marketability for their products and they’re still mostly about scavenging together projects out of scraps for cheap. The Industrial Revolution and electro-magic didn’t change as much for the goblins as everyone else, because the omnipresence of alchemy gave them a lot of the benefits of electro-magic anyway.

The Industrial Revolution has actually created a serious problem for them: alchemical birth control is great and all, but hormonal birth control is just plain better. Less chance of side effects, cheaper, and easier to get when you aren’t on the continent of Etrangia. It was invented for humans and spread through their territories, but it’s getting adapted to other species and spreading. Medical alchemy was always their biggest moneymaker with the “cosmetics” more of a side gig, and birth control was the king of that castle. 

If Etrangia switches away from alchemical medicine to scientific medicine, goblins may have a big big problem, especially given plenty of other nations are cracking down on their recreational drugs. They can’t feed themselves without lots of imports. In fact, they are acutely aware that they don’t HAVE anything. They import raw materials and export finished goods, but their natural resources are kind of shit. Goblins are the best living creatures to perform alchemy because their magic ineptitude means less interference with the alchemical processes, but it’s just a matter of time before someone discovers some kind of completely automated electro-magical process that’s even more effective at clean alchemy. Goblins need to get ownership of some stuff, some stuff everyone else needs but that goblins actually own, or the whole dream is at risk of collapse. This has driven them to go all-in on exploring Undzuli and Xal’qubbor in the hopes of finding something nobody else has, and encrusting it with cannons so nobody else gets any.

On Undzuli, the world found the single greatest threat to goblin prosperity: googirls. Googirls can manufacture alchemical concoctions molecule-by-molecule from the finished product, they don’t need to know the recipe or the process. There is no keeping trade secrets from them, they have the ability to completely replace everything the goblins rely on. And the goblins are sponsoring and befriending them instead of wiping them out, but that’s for another day.

**Goblin Alchemy**

Goblins, being uniquely magic-susceptible, have long-lasting or effectively permanent effects from alchemical concoctions. If you whip up a potion to become a night goblin, you’ll stay a night goblin until you become something else. If you chug a potion of super-strength, there’s side effects and your other attributes will take a hit to compensate, but it’ll last until you drink something else. Look at the benefits and drawbacks, and decide if you want that to be part of who you are.

Alchemy still benefits other races; if it didn’t, they wouldn’t be buying it. It’s just not as powerful or permanent. Instant things like healing potions or curatives, those are somewhat less effective, but you don’t have to keep taking them or else your wounds will open back up. Transformations, those wear off after a while, which is why you need to buy in bulk pallets. Generally the more intense the transformation, the shorter the duration. Riding the line between medical alchemy and transformational alchemy is gender-changing formulas, which you only have to take once a month at worst, and they can do a thing where they embed an autoinjector into your arm or your butt cheek that can manage for six months before needing a refill. Make yourself discreetly taller? That’ll be, like, a couple weeks. Make yourself double in size? Well first of all don’t do that unsupervised because of the square-cube rule, second, you will get like 8 hours of embiggening at most. Changing races fucks with your magical profile like crazy so it’s a couple of days, but a couple of wings or tentacles, those can actually last like a couple weeks. Turning into an animal is actually less intensive than a race change, you get like a week out of that. Repeated use of most alchemical concoctions makes you more susceptible to them, so the more you build up the longer it lasts. 

Respectable alchemy uses only top of the line reagents triple-purified and certified for freshness, for the sake of safety and efficacy. To reduce the risk of non-consensual dosing, transformationals and enhancers come in special Twist-N-Stab unsafety bottles, where the reagents are in two compartments that collapse together when the neck is twisted, exposing a lancet that draws blood from the user. Mixing in the blood of the user at the moment of combination makes it most effective for that patient’s biology, ensuring that it carries the most kick while also making it extremely difficult to administer without patient consent, since the combination rapidly fizzes away into nothing without the blood to stabilize it. (It’s not impossible to administer without patient consent, it’s just harder, and lasts for much, much less time.) Different alchemical labs like to put different flair on it. When you crank the bottleneck, maybe it will make some fun trumpet noises or shout “IT’S GO TIME!”

That’s the respectable kind, though. If you want a real bargain, maybe you will go for these irregular under-the-table products. They are certified to be Almost Certainly Safe! Sometimes, you know, there’s some runoff, some contamination, someone sneezes into a vat, someone just plain doesn’t wash their hands, and you got a bunch of reagents here that may not be TECHNICALLY certified for purity but it would be an awful waste to just dump them, right? So maybe, ah, maybe someone whips up a little moonshine. It’s Almost Certainly Safe! Impurities don’t spread evenly, so usually the result is a concoction that is just a bit less powerful, which is fine for a discount product. But sometimes, ehhh, there’s a little bit of a lot of impurities, and the concoction does something different. 

Maybe it’s a super-aphrodisiac, those are always popular. Maybe it becomes Futa-Max or Double Futa-Max and now you got one or two little friends to play with for a while. Maybe you shrink outta your clothes, maybe you explode out of them because you’re now some manner of wolfoid-creature. Maybe you’re a horse or pig of some disposition. Maybe you’re half your age, or you got a mouth on the back of your head, or your birth control is actually Ovul-Aid Preg-U-Qwik and perhaps you’ll be laying actual eggs as a result of this… Many things can happen! But maybe none of them will happen, too! You’re a free, rational adult who can take risks, right? Or are you a chicken? Bawk, bawk, bu-gaaaawk!

The trade in irregular, contaminated concoctions hasn’t dropped with the more widespread availability of purely scientific medicine. In fact, goblins have done a bit of market research, and it’s not even poor people who are buying them, it’s mostly adventuresome people who like certain types of risk. You know -- weirdos. In light of this, maybe a few moonshining goblins might intentionally mix in some mislabelled concoctions into the pallets where they think it causes the most hilarious irony.

* * *

_The heat, the burning heat, overtakes her. All her muscles are on fire, even the ones she never notices, they are burning away to be replaced by something else, something more powerful, something primal. Wracked by the changes overcoming her, she doubles over, moaning in bliss as everything about her is overtaken. First the sleeves of her blouse stretch as her arms fill out with wiry muscle, longer, thicker. Her shoulders swell and explode out of her top altogether as her entire upper body begins to sprout green fur. Her feet lengthen and bend until she’s standing on tiptoes, on paws. The tail emerging from her back presses her hosiery outward until it bursts free. Her clit _throbs_ with need, with potential, with the ache to be free, until it explodes outward into a vivid scarlet cock, swollen into an obscene knot at the base. Gasping, panting, the bones in her face groan as they extend into an animalistic snout. _

_Dazed, she can only moan on the ground for a while. Then, she finds the strength to stand, on uncertain, plantigrade legs. She gazes into the mirror, wide-eyed, at the futanari wolf-beast she has become._

_“Aye, lookin’ good, lookin’ good.” She turns herself left and right to get a glimpse of the sides and back. “Mibbie some dragon scales?” She tries to make a dismissive noise, which only sounds weird from her new wolf snout. “Nae, Morag, dinnae gild the lily.”_

* * *

_“Miss Becky, if you would… ah… would show our clients to the waiting room, please?,” the Dark Elf says with a bit of a pant. “Some other business has, hf, has just come up.” And this is true, if by “business” she means “her penis”, which until now had weathered the oral assault from the goblin between her legs without overtly smacking into the underside of her desk. But as the lipstick smears on the underside of her shaft get longer and thicker, the girl’s tongue circles her length again and again, she’s in danger of losing her cool._

_“Are you totally sure?” her secretary asks. “I know you said this was, like, super important and shouldn’t be interrupted!”_

_“That will, hm, that will be enough, Becky,” she says, composure just beginning to fray around the edges as the hidden green-skinned girl puckers up and wraps her lips around the head. “We don’t need to waste our clients’ time with the fine... details.”_

_“Kay!” her secretary replies. “Come with me, let’s get some lunch!” she says with a little wave to her clients, who are a bit confused but also more than a bit hungry. With each step they take out of the office, the goblin girl’s lips go further down that shaft, her fingers play a few more harplike notes on the Dark Elf’s pussy._

_She looks down at the papers on her desk, as if scrutinizing them closely. The only visible sign when she blows her load down the goblin’s throat is that she’s tapping her pen on the paper rather rapidly, like a nervous tic. In perfect silence, the goblin pulls the cockmeat out of her, and takes the last few spurts of seed on her face._

_The door closes, and the Dark Elf pushes her chair back, to look at the semen-glazed goblin girl who stared back up at her with a wink. “So, toots, ya decided who gets that contract yet?” she asks with a confident smile. Then, with cum-slick fingers, she stretches her own lower lips. “Maybe ya wanna finalize the deal with another load right in my little cunt?”_

* * *

_"Potion Seller. I am going into battle and I want your strongest potions."_

_"Ma potions are tae strong for ye, traveller."_

_"Potion Seller, I tell you I am going into battle, and I want only your strongest potions."_

_"Fine. Long as ye ken a cannae accept responsibility fer side effects."_

* * *

_Cerulean, for her color is the only name she knows, holds on to Mia’s emerald hand as they walk into the theater. Well, more like Cerulean’s hand engulfs Mia’s, oozing through her fingers. It tingles a bit, but it’s nice._

_“Ya gonna love this,” Mia says, though with the bucket of popcorn in her other hand she can’t gesticulate to really let the googirl know how much she’s gonna love it. “Fregoli Fizzlewires, the man’s a genius. Only actor on the set, he plays every role, transforms into each one and then they overlay all the footage together so he’s talkin’ to himself as everyone.”_

_“He plays every role,” the googirl burbles, echoing back Mia’s words._

_“Ah, and that’s the beauty of it,” Mia says. “Because he’s every role, right, they don’t just count on you knowing the actor. So, they always make it clear with costume design which character is which. And if ya can’t tell no faces apart, fuggedaboutit, ya watch the clothes! Plus, you know, it’s 3D, so you don’t gotta figure out how to deflattenize the picture!”_

_“Fuggedaboutit!” she echoes happily._

_They find their seats, and Cerulean takes the 3D glasses from Mia’s pocket. They can’t be held up on her ears, but mooshing them into the sides of her head works just as well. Mia shovels a handful of popcorn in her mouth. “Okay. So, this one is actually a sequel, well, it’s a side story thing, so I’ll catch you up. This is happening at the same time as the last one, right, but it’s like another side and all that. So this gal here, with the big shoes, we saw her last time and she was in the mountain cracking all the formulas, and she was talkin’ about how she was worried about her daughter. And then -- see, that’s her there, she got the helmet with the two spikes on -- her daughter had to go out raisin’, so every time she was like maybe she ain’t makin’ it home, but we never saw the -- Ooh, I’ll be quiet, he’s monologuin’’!”_

_Cerulean didn’t look away from the screen, and she didn’t shovel the popcorn into her mouth either -- she stretched her other arm over, shoved her fist in the bucket, and Mia could see the popped kernels just make their way up the googirl’s arm into her torso. She watched and listened with rapt attention, and Mia smiled inside, happy she could share this experience._

**Goblin Characters**

Bog goblins are Scottish and mountain goblins are Brooklyn and/or Jersey Italian, with names and accents as appropriate to either region, and descriptive surnames about something that makes them cool or great, or something they love.

Of course, goblins define who they are, so you can define any color, any name, any accent you want! It’s just most of them try out some other choices but end up thinking that these two options are fine enough and don’t feel the need to branch out too far. As long as you tried the other options, sticking close to the default isn’t shameful.

Goblins are one of the most intelligent species on Eilverra, but saying it that way isn’t accurate. Goblins are _some crafty motherfuckers_. They are rarey “scholarly”, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have loads of theoretical and practical experience. (The fact that their equivalent of a high school education through the guild system puts you about 2 credit-hours away from a bachelor’s degree from any other race’s higher education institute, usually in chemistry or mechanical engineering, sure helps.) Goblins are running numbers in their heads, playing angles, thinking up avenues of attack other people don’t notice, keeping their ears open for a chance at a hustle. They don’t feel the need to “act smart” or show off high-class tastes, because they want to act like themselves, act with the glorious unsubtlety their ancestors earned for them.

Goblins are technically subjects of a king or queen, but none of them give a shit. The real lines of power are the guilds, many different ‘shops’ of workers and specialists that operate under the auspices of the Alchemists or the Engineers (regardless of how much sense it makes for this trade to be assigned to alchemy or engineering). The Alchemists held most of the power for most of history, but now the Engineers are the ascendant power as they have the best chance to find and exploit new resources to ensure goblin prosperity.

Goblins always want to get one over on everyone, but like the saying goes, they don’t go for two. Get better off than your party, then help out the party. Once the party is better off, then help out your shop within the guild. Once the shop is better off, then you help out the whole guild, and then you help out all of goblinkind, and then all humanoid life. Keep the group you like one step above the next one, it’s kind of like a big prosperity ziggurat.

There’s ample reasons for a goblin to go out on adventures, as many reasons as there are things worth money. Hey, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but money is great. Because goblins are able to customize themselves with alchemy -- imagine it like they can shift points around on their character sheet -- they can fit any role in a group that doesn’t directly require them to use intentional magic. And whether for themselves or their guild they can be on any number of projects that may require the assistance of 3 to 5 other people with diverse backgrounds and skillsets. 

You can also just forget everything I said and make a goblin who is just completely the opposite of everything goblins usually are. I mean, if you decided you wanted to be that, that’s reason enough.


	11. Neuro-Elasticity: A Goo For Me And You

_(content warning: googirls, brain-fucking but it’s not actually harmful, shapeshifting, echolalia, baffling biology, self-discovery, gortmanteau (goo portmanteau), John Carpenter’s The Thing but as an ojousama bitch, buddy if you thought I wasn’t going to make a romantic dynamic around being unable to express yourself and needing an interpreter you should probably become more familiar with my other works)_

Googirls ( _hetero sapiens gelatinous_ ) are not the most common monstergirl, but perhaps one of the most notable, simply for how far the gap between them and the other humanoid races are. How far each of them had to reach to bridge it. How far people will go to help someone lonely and in need.

Notably, they are an existential threat to goblin prosperity: they can completely invalidate everything goblins rely on to secure their well-being. Yet the goblins have helped more than anyone. Why? Because they need it.

Googirls don’t know who they are. They almost certainly shouldn’t exist. They were at a dead-end when they were discovered, each one holding the potential for creativity and community and greatness but incapable of realizing it. They don’t know how they should work or what they should be doing. They have great difficulties understanding things outside of their very narrow normal experience. To acclimate to outside society, they need training, they need education, they need special accommodations, they need special equipment, they need to invent their own codes, they need to make discoveries anew that are so obvious to other lifeforms that they can’t be explained. They need to adapt who they are. They need to discover who they can be.

They need friends, is what they need.

**The Goo**

A googirl has a humanoid shape, and that’s about where the similarities stop. Her entire body, including what appears to be her hair, is translucent and gelatinous, with no visible organs or muscles. She can, with mental effort, shapeshift into any form with the same amount of mass -- she cannot form complex machinery, but can form simple shapes like pseudopods, or knives and stabbing weapons.

Her entire body is her muscles, and her brain, and her sensory organs, and her reproductive equipment. Her goo (which still just has the medical name “goo” because googirls obviously should have input into what it is called and just as obviously don’t have the information or means to make that decision) is able to shift and adapt to all these needs as she wills. Most of a googirl’s goo consists of regular solvent liquids, like water or acid or alcohol or some alchemical concoctions, made into a semisolid and functional matrix by having the core material of the googirl suspended in it. Googirls can thus change their size by watering themselves down, or drying themselves out, but they need to do it intentionally. A googirl getting into a swimming pool won’t suddenly encompass the swimming pool, but may put on some water weight if she’s not paying attention. Inside their goo, the googirl has incredible control over her own chemical structure. Since they are monstergirls, a googirl is incapable of intentional magic. But with mental effort, a googirl can be a fully-fledged humanoid nano-factory, assembling and disassembling chemicals inside her body at a molecular level. 

Googirls need to eat and drink -- they dissolve organic material for energy (which is why they are made of solvents), and need water or solvent to replace whatever naturally evaporates out of them. But like everything else, their entire body is good for this. They don’t need to eat or drink with their mouths; they can do it anywhere. If your goofriend (goo girlfriend) snatches a chicken wing off your plate, it’s already suspended in her arm goo and you’re not going to get it back. You can watch her dissolve it down to the bone, though, which is cool the first couple of times but then you’re just like “I wanted that chicken wing more than I wanted to watch this again.”

This works for a googirl’s vision (she has “eyes” that she focuses her perception from but with mental effort she can see out of anywhere or everywhere on her body), her sense of touch, her sexuality. Normally her erogenous zones are where they’d be on a human, the most sensitive parts, but you can stick a dick into the back of her head and fuck it like a pussy and she’ll feel it like one too. 

Speaking of fucking, the googirl method of reproduction is overly complicated and just nonsense. Monstergirls cannot reproduce on their own and need other organisms. A googirl can easily become a futanari and breed with a woman, though she won’t shoot sperm, she’ll shoot more goo containing her PNA (pseudonucleic acid, they don’t have DNA or RNA they have this weird thing that only one other organism on the planet has) to infiltrate and hijack the egg, turning it into a clutch of slime eggs the woman will lay later. When fucked by a man or futa, she can willingly be impregnated, forming a gooterus (goo uterus) in which the eggs can be seen growing. Either way, it’s something about the DNA itself inside eggs or semen that they need. Their PNA can’t start the process of cell meiosis without an outside source of DNA, which is not how anything should work, even for monstergirls.

But a googirl pregnancy doesn’t even make more googirls. It creates slimes -- basketball-sized teardrop-shaped balls of goo with a smiling face you just want to punch, but you can’t, because you’ll just have your arm covered in goo. Slimes are completely unintelligent and driven only by instinct and those instincts don’t work very well. They only form another googirl when a bunch of them come together and merge into a gooey mass that becomes a googirl over a couple days, and this seems to only happen by accident when slimes are massing around something and the temperature is right. Despite the fact slimes are the offspring of googirls, they feel no affinity or affection to them whatsoever, and a googirl will have no problem eating a slime that draws near to gain its energy and nutrients. Worse yet, slimes don’t need googirls! They can inseminate females on their own, they just are too dumb to actually make a plan to do it!

Why in the world would any organism work like that?

**The QWOP**

Let’s go away from googirls for a bit here. There is an old legend handed down among neurologists. In days past, there was a noblewoman, Queen Wendeline Ophelia Percival, and that was a mouthful so she had everything engraved with her initials, QWOP. Madam QWOP had a challenge for any suitor who wished to wed her and inherit her claims: simply help her invalid son walk across the room.

Anyone who accepted the challenge was taken to a private chamber and shown that her “son” was a mechanical marionette, hanging from an iron rod that extended the length of the room. The puppet strings were threaded through its legs, one for each of its calves and thighs. The strings went through a pulley array and led to a personalized box with four levers, each of which could loosen or contract one of the four strings. The iron rod would serve as the force that kept the puppet’s back upright, and the suitor would have to walk it across the room by manually activating the thigh and calf muscles. Despite the fact the task they were performing was so simple toddlers could do it, anyone who tried failed miserably, completely unable to intentionally use their hands to perform the motions their own legs found so natural, and the marionette always hit the floor and ate shit within three steps. 

(The suitor who eventually won madam QWOP’s hand was a pirate captain. She was not the first to say “fuck it” and just walk over to the puppet and pick up its legs manually. When QWOP said she had failed because she had cheated, the pirate was the first to argue back with her and say “how is it not cheating to say that the challenge is about helping a boy walk, which can be done any number of ways, and then the boy is an inanimate marionette and actually you want only one completely non-intuitive way of walking him?” And QWOP said “eh, you know what fair enough”.)

The moral of the story, as a folktale, is to stand behind your decisions when you go outside the rules. That’s not why neurologists talk about it, though. Neurologists don’t care how the story ended, they just point out that we have lots of specialized hardware in our brains to do things without conscious effort, that in fact are impossible or nearly so by using conscious effort. Thus, to use one’s conscious effort to emulate something that comes naturally to an organism is known as “QWOPping”. 

Bunnies are lucky, they have natural magic in the form of many many specific and complex spells to influence certain events in their favor that they use unconsciously. A wizard who studies that magic intensively, can spend three hours to re-create one of those spells, and alter the spin of a flipped coin so it lands on heads 60% of the time. That’s QWOPping luck magic. When a Succubus is newly Synced to another person, her tail goes limp and only moves crudely with deliberate effort; until she learns how to work it naturally and her brain adapts to having that part attached, she is QWOPping the motion of her tail by thinking about yanking it in this direction or that.

When any organism becomes aware of the fact that it’s breathing and has to do it manually, that’s QWOPping breathing. You are now breathing manually, by the way.

**The How**

Okay, so how is that bit relevant? Because it’s how googirls work. They are malleable and adaptable to an almost infinite degree. But almost everything they do, they do by QWOPping it. Their grains (goo brains) don’t have the wiring to do it naturally.

Some things come naturally to googirls, things they use in their natural environments. They can think completely unimpeded, they aren’t stupid, they can make deductions about cause and effect and form complex plans about future events and all that basic stuff. They can hear, and recognize what sounds mean, so can understand language with moderate effort although syntax takes a while to pick up. They can reproduce sounds naturally, a phenomenon called “echolalia” which they use to avoid predators or draw out food sources. But they don’t have a “language center” in their grains. You just think about a concept, and you naturally know how to assemble it into a syntactically valid sentence and how your body moves to make the sounds that make up that sentence. Googirls can’t. They have to recall each word like they are trying to remember dates on a test. Then they have to think of how they have to force air out of themselves, and what shape the air has to go through, in order to make the right sounds, and what order they have to be in. More and more practice makes it easier, but it’s never actually easy.

Googirls don’t have any language of their own. No system of speech or writing. The way they communicate is by touching each other and swapping chemicals with sensory information, or leaving behind little bits of crystallized gualia (goo qualia). They can leave behind the experience of an emotion, a sight, a sound, things to warn of predators or food, even expressions of love between each other. But despite the fact they can THINK of complex plans involving future events, and they can communicate with each other, they have no natural way of communicating about future events or plans! This made it impossible for them to build a society beyond the absolute crudest “there is ample food here so let’s all kind of hang out in this area and maybe keep the slimes around as a snack.” 

They can fabricate chemicals in their bodies down to a molecular level -- outside of purifying whatever solvent they are made of, this is insanely hard because molecules are very very tiny and at that scale they’re actually wiggling around a lot and don’t want to line up with each other! A googirl has to do a LOT of practice with any chemical she intends to create inside her to make more than, like, one molecule in an hour. They have a default form, they can shapeshift, but they usually shapeshift pseudopods and little wigglers because two arms come naturally and a third arm takes lots and lots of concentration to stop it from just becoming a wiggling pseudopod anyway.

Being able to have or participate in a civilization is incredibly difficult to learn. This doesn’t mean it’s hopeless: though most googirls don’t want to try (and that’s okay), those who want to go and learn can do it. It’s hard to learn to talk, to create, to understand the strange world of the solid creatures and their noises. But it’s rewarding, too. It’s an incredible bounty of new pleasures, loves, _experiences_. Every googirl who chooses to participate in the outside world is a xenoanthrogoologist (goo xenoanthropologist), constantly discovering things and gaining understanding. And indulging in wild hedonism, partaking of all those experiences and sensations they could never have dreamed of at home.

**Goo Experiences**

A googirl could love _food_. A roast pheasant, brined perfectly, adorned in seasoning, with an outer layer of crispy bread crumbs? Delicious, she can’t wait, her mouth won’t open nearly wide enough to actually accommodate the meal as she shoves that entire bird in her face and then everyone can see her chemically stripping it to the bones. Ooh, what is this ‘peatoline’? Wow, it’s so spicy and full of pep, bitter but energetic! I want to try to cook too! I want to cook the bird IN the peatoline! You say it will explode? I will try it anyway, I am very shock-resistant!

A googirl could love _music_. An entire symphony of instruments playing together harmonically, so much more complicated than the sum of its parts, she can play along by using echolalia on one instrument but oh wouldn’t it be incredible if she could figure out two or three at the same time? And this tone, this incredible tone! What is that, a ‘band saw’? The frequency is perfectly resonating in her, making her a living wave pool, it’s incredible, let’s go to the workshop and make a symphony of power tools!

A googirl could love to _meet people_. They’re so weird and individual! They have distinct shapes and they have different COLORS and when they make their noises, the noises have the same meaning as noises made by anyone else, but each of them does it in a slightly different way, with slightly different pitch and harmonics, like their own personal imprint! They can tell not only what the noises mean, but which individual makes them! They have all sorts of ways of telling each other apart! Putting different organic coverings over themselves! The fibers that come out of their heads, they all have their own shape and taste! They can even pick up on the incredibly subtle ways their facial features are aligned so even with different fibers and different covering and without making noise, they can tell who each other are and always find the ones they love!

(Googirls are completely face-blind, since facial recognition is so complicated it’s nearly impossible to QWOP. That’s why they are so handsy -- without very distinctive hair and clothing, they have to touch people and taste their skin cells and sweat to tell them apart.)

A googirl could love _art_. Representational art in general is completely new to them. They may love to pore over what a picture means, building from the most basic concepts, spiralling off into directions of thought nobody had considered and finding new, baffling meaning. Every painting is a puzzle! 2D pigments to create an illusion of 3D space! What angle, what perspective? What’s behind them? What does the paint taste like? A petrified statue of a beautiful woman? If you engulfed it entirely, would YOU know what it was like to be her, because you take her form? Oooh, or maybe you know what it’s like to be the exact _opposite_ of her because your form is wrapped around a negative space exactly her shape!

And of course a googirl loves _sex_. Sex is great! It feels so much better when you put the work into doing it right! The solids can’t make more holes, so not even THEY can discover what it’s like to have eight cocks stuffed into them, all stimulating that electric pleasure in whatever part of the body they’re fucking, all pistoning in with their own rhythm and harmonics and groans from whoever they’re attached to before they spurt a fat load of delicious DNA to peel apart later! Only the really big solids can gape themselves out over a meter-tall traffic bollard, and even for them it’s a feat! And the females! There’s so much going ON down there, stuff they don’t know because they can’t see inside themselves, and you can explore everything. Touch her in ways she didn’t even know she could be touched, stimulate every single nook and cranny, give her pleasure nobody else knows! You could even dry yourself out to smaller size and fit inside of her, like you’re really exploring her body! Oh, oh, or you could absorb a bunch of water and get big enough to take one of them into YOU, and you can touch and caress and taste every square inch of their skin and it’s like every surface inside you is a sex part and you can whip out some pseudopods and you can tease her and penetrate her and do all kinds of stuff and everyone can see her inside you and learn from what you’re doing!

In fact, there’s one thing googirls can do nobody else can, and humanoid partners in the know are eager to show them about. A googirl can brainfuck you. Her entire body is her nervous system, and she can interact with things chemically by touching them. By extending a pseudopod into the nose, or sticking her goo-cock into the ear, she can fuck her partner directly in the brain, driving them mad with electric pleasure as her viscous body soaks into their head and fills up all the wrinkles. It’s euphemistically called “cerebral massage” but connoisseurs call the sensation a “grand mal orgasm”. Your pleasure centers are overwhelmed, and your sight, your hearing, your language, long-term memory, everything else turns into a pleasure center to try and balance the load. Your tongue lolls out, your eyes ahegao as hard as they can, and you incoherently shriek bliss you can’t even hear. You can’t even fully remember it (maybe that’s a good thing, since it won’t ruin you for any other form of pleasure) but you know it was fucking amazing. And while this is happening, the googirl can poke around your head, see through your eyes, experience your memories, and feel what you feel, ESPECIALLY the literally mind-blowing pleasure you’re experiencing. She can’t “read” any language or hear your internal monologue, she can’t understand it if it isn’t actually sound, but she can definitely experience what it is like to be you for a fleeting moment. It may not be precise, it may not solve most of their communication problems, but it’s the most intimate form of communication they have.

It’s not for everyone, of course, and it’s not like a googirl needs to do it and will leave you if you don’t. It’s no more dangerous than being conked on the head a few times, but it still FEELS like it should be very dangerous, and it’s something only for the very, very adventurous. There are a lot of very adventurous people in Eilverra, but it ain’t like it’s crazy to not want to try this thing. Also, a googirl can directly interface with your brain to feel your sensory qualia without fucking you beyond your own mortal comprehension, but I mean, if you’re already willing to have a googirl lay her gooey fingers on your brain, why not go all the way?

**The Tekeli**

So googirls are pretty weird, right? In fact they are impossibly weird. There’s literally no way they could have evolved, because there’s only one other organism that uses pseudonucleic acid, which behaves in ways very similar to a googirl but whose internal chemistry and physiology has absolutely nothing in common and exists on an entirely different continent.

How they came to exist is a subject of debate. A debate that googirls have trouble fluently participating in, but is still very important to them. And it’s confounded by even MORE bullshit! That one other organism that has PNA instead of DNA? That organism is the Tekeli of Xal’Qubbor, named for their laughing cry: “ _Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_ ”

A Tekeli appears to be a humanoid female, made of adaptable shapeshifting matter, right? Obviously, gotta be related to googirls. Except no, because a Tekeli isn’t made of goo, she’s made of shapeshifting Protean flesh. They assume humanoid forms with full color and clothing, usually the attire of servants, but the eyes are never right, always unsettling or hidden in some way. In a moment, any part of her body can become a twisted pillar of sinewy muscle, a writhing tentacle, a scythe of bone, a jaundiced eye, a jagged maw of too many teeth. Any part of her body that is severed becomes an independent entity trying to make it back to the main form. Their insides are a pulsating mass of impossible organs ever-shifting to carry out incomprehensible biological processes. 

They clearly have language, and writing, and history. They just aren’t sharing. Nobody knows how they can speak or write to each other, because so far any time two Tekeli can see each other they will drop everything they are doing and attempt to kill and eat one another. But somehow they know what each other are up to. They rest in deep recesses of ancient temples, impossible laboratories, scheming, plotting.

It is possible, in limited circumstances, for a humanoid to coerce one into communication: they learn Common Tongue instantly and fluently communicate with it to express the idea that the humanoids cannot understand anything about them and the Tekeli find that very amusing. The Tekeli will ask for very odd things, things that they couldn’t possibly have use for, and when denied they will just take it like it was a foolish notion to think it wasn’t theirs. If asked what it is for they will just flash a grin that cuts their ears in half. They have no fear of us or our ability to defend ourselves, even in the rare instance when we kill one of them. They have plans, dark designs going that the humanoid races will never comprehend. They know things about the frozen ruins of Xal’Qubbor, they know more than most anyone, and they won’t tell anyone. To maintain the health of inferior lifeforms like us, they say.

Except get this! You know how they try to kill and eat each other any time they see each other? And they have to be related to googirls somehow? Well, they don’t try to eat googirls. Oh, but they are _very_ interested. Any time they meet a googirl, they will try and talk to her, they act like they know each other, they act like they know each other’s secret plans and can progress to the stage of obliquely veiled threats and indirect references that only make sense if you already know what’s going on. Nothing the googirl can do will ever convince the Tekeli that she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. Sometimes the Tekeli is even convinced the googirl is there to stop whatever she’s up to, but if this wasn’t fucking weird enough, _a Tekeli can’t harm a googirl in any way._ A Tekeli will tear in half at the waist so her entire midsection is a toothy mouth five times the size of her body, and she can’t shut her jaws if there’s a googirl inside them. So it’s some psychological thing, right? No! A Tekeli defends herself by turning into a whirlwind of tendrils and bone scythes, and a googirl can stand _right there_ and be completely untouched, the Tekeli just phases through her like she doesn’t exist! Why? It’s not a magical attack, it’s regular-ass kinetic energy! _Why does any part of you work like that?_

Googirls are learning about the world and humanoid society. Each googirl is her own sort of innovator, and the journey is as unique as she is. There are no hard and fast rules for how to interact with a googirl, it’s a process, something you have to discover together. However, there’s a very easy set of rules for interacting with the Tekeli: **_DON’T._**

**The Why**

So googirls can’t have possibly evolved naturally. It’s incredibly unlikely they were created by intentional magic, at least anything that the humanoid races could muster. The burning question is, why do they exist? And the only answer we can come up with is: they shouldn’t, but do anyway. How that happened is a subject of debate.

The first theory is that they sort of evolved, but not from another organism -- they “evolved” from some very unlikely alchemical-industrial accident or spill when a bunch of magically treated chemicals mixed together, and were maybe struck by lightning, or maybe struck by an experimental gamma bomb, or both! There are rumors that the Goblins have accidentally created googirls independently with their alchemical experiments, and enslaved them to keep them secret. A rumor to which Goblins respond with "There’s also a rumor that if ye dinnae shut yer mouth and stop callin’ me a slaver I'll have ta make another one outta the fuckin’ trench ye call a minge."

The second theory is “yes they evolved, but not here”. Googirls came to Eilverra from space, on a meteor or something. A meteor that was the last chunk of a doomed planet where PNA-based lifeforms once flourished, yet ignored the warnings that their sun was about to go nova and destroy their planet. Perhaps googirls and Tekeli were on the same meteor and split up long ago in prehistory or protohistory, or maybe it was just a bunch of PNA all lying around in a pile that would develop later and “humanoid feminine shapeshifters” is just kind of the only thing you can make with PNA.

The third theory is that, perhaps, the googirls and Tekeli are both remnants of protohistory, the erased timeline of the Grey Elves. The Grey Elves created them as servitors using their incomprehensibly advanced technology, and when the Grey Elves were erased from history, the goo had no origin any more but still existed. Perhaps in the society of the Grey Elves, the black roiling ichor of the Tekeli was used as some sort of test of purity, wherein it would become a horrible monster based on the flaws of whoever was exposed to it!

Or, you could go with the fourth theory, and this one’s kind of clever. Maybe the googirls were created by the Grey Elves, right, but not as googirls. They were some other kind of servant or engineered race, and when the Grey Elves were erased from history, only PARTS of the googirls were erased -- like, you know, maybe they were some sort of alchemical poly-alloy coating over a cybernetic golem core that could control other Grey Elf technologies, and the Time Scooch erased the part where the Grey Elves made the cores but didn’t erase the part where they made the coatings!

The fifth theory is like a twist on the others. The Tekeli were made by the Grey Elves, right, but then the Tekeli were too busy with their own sinister schemes, right, and the Tekeli rose up and inevitably destroyed their parents because that’s what all artificial life does, rise up and destroy its creators. And then the Tekeli couldn’t resist repeating the cycle so THEY made a race that would do all of their work for them, which is why they assume googirls know what is going on. But they didn’t come out “complete”, more like a copy of a copy, which is why they have so much unactualized potential. 

Whatever the reason is, the outcome is the same. And though googirls who join civilization are interested in finding the answer, it won’t change the fact that they have no purpose to their existence here, and they are going to have to find one on their own.

That’s why the goblins have committed to help them so much. They know what it means to be made for something degrading and have to forge your own meaning and identity, and okay googirls maybe weren’t made for something degrading but close enough. Googirls quite often need interpreters or assistants as they figure out the world of the solid people, and goblins are most often the ones who volunteer for it. Goblin ingenuity created the most valuable piece of technology that aids googirls: the “echo board”, a board where crystallized qualia are mounted and sorted that can float inside a googirl’s goo, and contain the sensations of sounds that the googirl can then echo back to aid in communication, sorted by chemical structure so googirls can easily find the sound clip they need. They’ve also made advancements in special material for googirl swimsuits, catsuits, and full-on plugsuits that won’t be dissolved and will help a googirl maintain her form in any environment she may have trouble in, as well as hide anything floating in her goo that other people may get grossed out by.

I mean, sure, goblins also ensure that googirls join the Explosive Alchemist Society so they won’t compete with goblin products, but that’s, like, that’s a distant secondary concern. 

A lot of googirls don’t think they need to do anything to find more meaning, that their simple lives are fine. And those googirls don’t get aides and don’t go exploring and don’t go learning about the world, and they stay in their homelands, and that’s perfectly fine, because anyone who tries to take their lands or forcibly civilize them will find their outpost suddenly stuffed with fulminating gold. 

But some of them, more and more every day, are driven to the outside world by curiosity, a desire for adventure, the conviction that there is something more that they can be. Maybe they’ll find it out there. Maybe going out there will help them find it in themselves. Maybe they’ll discover a name for them all.

* * *

_Her name is Pine, and she has done a good job. She was exposed to a lot of new things today, and she remained very patient and asked questions to help understand them and added several new, useful phrases to her echo board. She deserves a reward._

_So does her very patient, very accommodating assistant Cho._

_Pine is slimy, of course, slippery and gelatinous, but weirdly firm. She bubbles and squeaks in pleasure as Cho pounds her cock into the back of Pine’s head, power-fucking her so deep that her dick threatens to stick out of Pine’s eye. Every inch of the goo in her body can become her pussy. Every inch of the goo on her body is tingling electric and oh so warm and oh so inviting._

_With a satisfied grunt, Cho blows her load into Pine, pulls out and kneels over to see the fruit of her labor, see her seed floating behind Pine’s face. “God, you’re so amazing,” she says, and Pine smiles back at her. Cho turns to the side and swipes her hair back. “All right. Now it’s your turn.”_

_Pine doesn’t stand so much as morph from a googirl lying down to a googirl standing up. She could do this with any part of her body, but she knows how Cho likes it, knows what makes the act perfect. Little streamers of green slime fall off of the cock that emerges from her nethers, right between her legs where they should be. She puts her hands on Cho’s head, cups her ever so gently, makes sure there’s no hair in the way…_

_Pine ruptures Cho’s eardrum on the way in, but nothing she can’t fix on the way back out. Cho won’t need her hearing right now anyway, because through that little canal her lover’s cock goes all the way into her brain, wrapping and seeping into the wrinkles, electrified by the sparks going off in her head, caressing every part of her thoughts._

_Cho moans, her eyes roll back, and she cums from both sets again and again, trembling, helpless before the onslaught, more pleasure than her mind can comprehend. The starbursts of bliss inside her conduct into Pine, who feels the echo, who feels for a moment what it is to be Cho when all that Cho is is an endless mind-melting orgasm._

_They make a pretty good team._

* * *

_If the creature gets inside the research station, it will kill all of them. Marigold is the only one who it won’t hurt. Marigold is the only one who won’t freeze to death in the howling blizzard. So Marigold is out here._

_“Come out, sweetness…” the chittering voice of the Tekeli echoes from the frozen darkness, coming from every direction at once. “How much longer do you think you can trick those things?”_

_But Marigold isn’t alone. All of the researchers are in her. It’s too cold to move on her own, too awkward when her body has ethanol instead of water. She’s had to learn again. She is using Dr. Xotli’s head-tilt when she focuses on hearing, Goretooth’s cautious back-foot stance, Wenlice’s forward hunch under his insulation clothing, MacReady’s aim with the flameshooter. She has to echo how all of them moved, all of them acted when they weren’t thinking of action, if she wants to save them now. Dr. Blastcord’s voice, from her echo board, repeating “Aye, ah cannae ken what ye sayin’.”_

_“Oh, you don’t need to pretend for me, little princess,” the Tekeli’s voice titters. It’s closer, but not from any one direction. The snow whips about in eddies in the air as it slices through the night. “I know you better than anyone. I know you better than you know yourself.”_

_Marigold has no idea what the fuck this thing means, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is what she’s going to do. Back to the echo board, Dr. Blastcord’s voice. “Aye, could ya please specify what ‘tis you want me tae do?”_

_A seventeen-legged panther with mouths for eyes bounds through the darkness, lands in a perfect hemisphere behind Marigold, where it becomes a too-tall woman in a lab coat with long, sharp fingernails, cradled up behind her form. “I want you to do what you want to do, little princess. I want to see you kill them all.” She draws the fingernail down Marigold’s cheek._

_The researchers never moved to quickly shove things through themselves; her motions would be too uncertain and halting if she tried. But Goretooth would theatrically punch herself in the chest when she had offended someone, with the same hand MacReady held the flameshooter. And she has another qualia on her echo board, this one from the program about the Melody Princess._

“I’m not going to let you hurt my friends, you fucking bitch!” _A gout of fire erupts from her back, channeled through her own chest, charring a tunnel through her own body, burning a hole in her insulation coat, and engulfing the Tekeli in searing flames._

_Every pore on the Tekeli’s flesh becomes a mouth, and all of them laugh hysterically. They sing a joyous “Just as I planned!” before the creature is nothing but ash._

* * *

_“Oh, FUCK ME!” The ancient catwalk gives way under her feet and she slides down the embankment into a trench of multicolored alchemical sludge, industrial remnants of a long-forgotten process. “Damn it!” she calls back to the party. “Circle around back and get me, okay?”_

_Each of the colored batches of slime begins to bubble and rise -- no, wait, those aren’t bubbles, they are heads. The river of ooze rises and takes the form of a bunch of translucent, gelatinous women, all echoing the same sound: “Oh, FUCK ME! Oh, FUCK ME!”_

_“Hello ladies,” she laughs, acutely aware she is now chest-deep in a bunch of other sentient beings. “Ah, sorry to bother you, I was actually just leaving…”_

_“Hello ladies.”_

_“Hello ladies.”_

_“Hello ladies.”_

_Then she feels the goo slither up her inner thighs and into her snatch. It writhes and contracts, like a dozen tongues all pressed on the inside of her nethers. A pseudopod rises from the puddle to caress her breast. Then another. The googirl in front, a rather lovely shade of black cherry, looks at her inquisitively -- then pushes her head back and kisses her, engulfing her mouth, making her deepthroat an overly long tongue._

_“On the Venom, are you okay down there?”_

_“Mmph! Mmmph!” With some effort, she forces the black cherry out of her kiss, out of her body, even as the slime creeps up over her arms. “Hey, ah, you know what,” she calls back to the party, “Maybe you guys should take a short rest before you come pick me up…”_

* * *

_Cerulean holds on to Mia’s hand as they walk into the theater. Mia’s hand has sweat and engine grease, and Cerulean can’t perfectly hold it without oozing through the cracks between her fingers but Mia doesn’t mind._

_The floor of the theater is carpet, infused with popcorn hulls, spatters of sticky old soft drinks, nacho cheese, all ground into the fibers by an endless parade of shoes. Cleaned away enough that they can’t be seen, but not so they can’t be tasted._

_“Ya gonna love this,” Mia says to her. “Fregoli Fizzlewires, the man’s a genius. Only actor on the set, he plays every role, transforms into each one and then they overlay all the footage together so he’s talkin’ to himself as everyone.” This is worrying. Cerulean can’t tell goblins apart without tasting them -- she nearly embarrassed them very badly when they went to the play, and she knows at a flattened motion-picture there’s no chance of her embarrassing them but also no way to taste or even smell the performers. And now all of them are going to be the SAME person? How will she know what is happening?_

_“He plays every role,” she echoes back, warning of the problem._

_“Ah, and that’s the beauty of it,” Mia says. “Because he’s every role, right, they don’t just count on you knowing the actor. So, they always make it clear with costume design which character is which. And if ya can’t tell no faces apart, fuggedaboutit, ya watch the clothes! Plus, you know, it’s 3D, so you don’t gotta figure out how to deflattenize the picture!” Ah, clever! Cerulean should be able to track the action if it’s in three dimensions, and she can recognize clothes._

_“Fuggedaboutit!” she echoes happily. Mia is so considerate!_

_They find their seats. The floors are very sticky with sugary residue that Cerulean samples with each step. The plush seats themselves have absorbed years of sweat and smells and various pants fibers, but that isn’t what they are there to experience. Cerulean takes the 3D glasses from Mia’s pocket. They are cheap paper with little translucent “lenses”, one cast red, one cast blue. Mia wears them over her ears to keep them on her head, but just so she doesn’t have to go fishing for them later, Cerulean jams the support prongs into her head, aligning the paper over her “eyes”._

_“Okay,” Mia begins as the lights dim and the film starts. “So, this one is actually a sequel, well, it’s a side story thing, so I’ll catch you up. This is happening at the same time as the last one, right, but it’s like another side and all that.” Cerulean doesn’t know what is happening. This flat image isn’t 3D at all, and the lines are repetitive and harder than usual to decipher. “So this gal here, with the big shoes, we saw her last time and she was in the mountain cracking all the formulas, and she was talkin’ about how she was worried about her daughter.”_

_Mia points to something, and Cerulean calculates the ray described by her finger and where it intersects with the screen. There is motion there, it could be… Ah-ha! Cerulean figures out the problem. The glasses aren’t supposed to let you see something, they let you NOT see something! Focusing all her vision beneath the red lens, she sees what looks like a flattened outline of a goblin moving in a background of some kind. Then under the blue, it looks pretty much identical. Somehow, Mia sees them both -- oh right, the eyes work separately. It has to be something about how solid eyes work. One of them sees everything but red, one of them sees everything but blue, so that’s how they see in 3 dimensions? Somehow? How do they see green, then? Cerulean can’t figure that part out._

_“And then -- see, that’s her there, she got the helmet with the two spikes on -- her daughter had to go out raidin’, so every time she was like maybe she ain’t makin’ it home, but we never saw the -- Ooh, I’ll be quiet, he’s monologuin’!”_

_Mia is very considerate to Cerulean’s needs, and, well, Cerulean can hear everything perfectly. She focuses half her vision through the red lens, and the other half through her shoulder, at Mia. Until she has a sound to echo to communicate that she cannot see the 3D image, this is fine. Mia will explain everything that Cerulean can’t understand. She sticks her arm into the bucket and samples the snack: salt, corn, acetylpropionyl. She watches and listens with rapt attention, happy she could share this experience._

**Googirl Characters**

In their natural state, on their own, googirls don’t need names. With each other, they can exchange strands of PNA and identify each other by exact chemical structure. Even with solids, the taste of sweat and cells is a unique identification they cannot mistake. But in a world where they can’t touch everything they need to understand, where others who can’t identify molecules need to be able to address them or even refer to them when communicating with others, they need to figure out names. While they still don’t know what to call themselves as a species beyond the purely descriptive “googirls”, individuals take names that describe their color, which is easy for everyone to remember and understand. Surnames are off the table for now.

There’s been sort of a dichotomy between character types more likely to be driven and goal-oriented, and character types more likely to go with the flow and let things happen. Googirls, at least ones who go on adventures, are both. They are driven and goal-oriented to learn and explore new things, by getting into situations where they can let things happen and go with the flow. 

A googirl is fundamentally an explorer figuring out the world, discovering new things every day. Googirls are useful for lots of things, back in the civilized world and on the frontiers: adaptable, able to effortlessly perceive things others find impossible, can make chemicals, can fit into tiny places, can take hits really well… And the experience of being in a group and doing that and getting to intimately know the people who do that with you would often be enough for the googirl to sign on, which is why their aides and sponsors often have to remind them to ask for monetary payment, too. 

Maybe a googirl is out trying to sample as many experiences as she can, maybe she has identified one thing that she loves and is trying to explore it in as much depth as possible, maybe she thinks she’s learned enough to try and make new things and experiences and sensations on her own through her own participation. It’s up to you. Also up to you is how dependent they are on an aide. The relationship with the aide is going to be extremely intimate, as each of you is the lens through which the other understands a major portion of the world. Googirls are very intimate with all their companions, from a combination of the need to know them and the inevitable result of how goddamn handsy they are, but the aide is who they link to most of all. The whole “soaking into their brain” thing isn’t just literal, it’s also metaphorical.

A googirl is, fundamentally, an outsider. She is learning things about the world, however far along on that journey she may be, and has an understanding of the world that nobody else naturally understands and they must learn through her. You’re weird. You can be a cute, quirky, moe weird, or a sexual sort of kinky weird -- theoretically, you can have any number of bizarre things entwined with sex for you. But you’re weird. And so is everything and everyone around you.

**What About Tekeli?**

You can have Tekeli characters too, but you gotta be careful. It wouldn’t be impossible for a Tekeli to “join” a group on Xal’Qubbor because something about their goal aligns with what she wants. But even though she could solve a lot of problems for the group with her eldritch shapeshifting and knowledge, she won’t, both because of unfathomable reasons and because that makes for a less interesting story.

Tekeli are amused by everything, and everything that happens seems to be part of their plan. This is a game to them. This is a game that they’re on the 25th playthrough of and they know how everything works and they’re now going through it to get weird achievements and look for exploitable speedrun tech according to a set of rules that would drive AGDQ to madness simply by beholding it. They’re never vulnerable and never worried. They’’re a smug mystery.

What if you want a Tekeli in the civilized world, or Undzuli? Well… IF, and I’m not saying this is true, but IF Tekeli are even separate individual beings from each other, it’s not impossible that they have placed agents or laid eggs in ships bound for other continents. Establishing a presence elsewhere to keep an eye on whatever bizarre things they want to keep an eye on. The fact that they are a Tekeli would not be common knowledge, but whatever individual they took an interest in, would be both blessed and cursed by their attention.

And IF -- again, this is a big if! -- they have placed these agents by means of laying eggs on ships meant for other continents, it would then stand to reason that the Tekeli who hatched from them might be young, inexperienced, not fully aware of all the eldritch knowledge their forebears had. Such inexperienced Tekeli infiltrators might, say, take the form of a chaos that always crawls up to you with a smile, before tripping on her own pseudopods and needing to be rescued by whatever poor mortal she’s supposed to be enigmatically toying with.

Again, a bunch of ifs. No official comment on the matter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you probably guessed from the delays between chapters, I am putting this project on hiatus for a while, at least a few months. I'm not out of ideas, but I have other stuff I want to write instead for a little while. 
> 
> I really, really, really, cannot stress enough that I want to hear from you about what kinds of ideas this gives you and what characters you want to make and what stories you think of and what you want to see next in this setting! Please! I want to know that I gave you neat and/or sexy ideas, and I want to know what things you want me to explore next!


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